Big Data Week is in full swing in New York City, and theCUBE is continuing its broadcast stream today, bringing you the best stories and analysis from the many events going on in the Big Apple.  Live from Big Data NYC, our own celebration of Big Data Week, we’ll feature exclusive interviews from the top executives in this space.

Watch LIVE : exclusive interviews on theCUBE

Event Details

#BigDataNYC kicks off a week from today at the Warwick Hotel on October 28-30, 2013.  The event will be hosted by SiliconANGLE and Wikibon, sponsored by Hortonworks and WANdisco.

You can watch theCUBE’s live broadcast on SiliconANGLE.tv, or right here at SiliconANGLE.com (see the video streaming on the right?)

Be sure to check back regularly for news and updates from #BigDataNYC, and subscribe to our YouTube channel for complete archives and playlist recaps from the event.

What to Expect

We’re asking the tough questions at #BigDataNYC this year, because the stakes have never been higher for the Big Data industry. It’s a time of transition for Big Data, as the seemingly infinite promises surrounding data management technology must take a realistic approach to business application.

We want to know how data management tools can be best delivered in the enterprise, how these applications can scale, and how market leaders and disruptors alike plan to commercialize a movement that’s steeped in open source history.

In the weeks leading up to today’s #BigDataNYC event, we looked at recent developments regarding these industry concerns, amassing a collection of interviews and analysis on related topics (see entire collection below).

What we found is that the Big Data market is still in need of scalable solutions, where software leads application integration, data democracy and innovative approaches to automation.  As the Big Data buzz dies down, it makes way for a very somber approach to today’s biggest business obstacles, demanding viable solutions that deliver more than hype.

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Big Data Week news highlights

from #BigDataNYC, #HadoopWorld, #StrataConf and #hw2013

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Azure + Hortonworks

Expanding their partnership to make data more accessible for Windows users, Microsoft and Hortonworks have launched a new Azure service that gives enterprises the flexibility to make sense of their information on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Generally available starting this week, Windows Azure HDInsight has been billed as a “100 percent Apache Hadoop” by Quentin Clark, the head of Microsoft’s Data Platform Group. The distribution is based on the Hortonworks Data platform, offers full compatibility with vanilla Apache Hadoop and supports Microsoft’s line of business intelligence tools, namely Excel, SQL Server and the PowerBI component of Office 365. It works with .NET and Java apps.

Clark explained in a blog post that Microsoft is targeting CIOs who want to tap into their growing mountains of data without allocating a significant portion of their budgets to deploying and maintaining an on-premise Hadoop cluster.

“Our goal to empower everyone with insights is the reason why Microsoft is investing, not just in technology like Hadoop, but the whole circuit required to get value from big data,” the executive wrote. “Our customers are demanding more from the data they have – not just higher availability, global scale and longer histories of their business data, but that their data works with business in real time and can be leveraged in a flexible way to help them innovate.”

HDInsight has had a big impact on the Microsoft-Hortonworks alliance. The companies reportedly nixed the development of an analytics-centric edition of Windows Server, which means that joint customers will have to settle for deploying HDS in their environments. No longer the lynchpin of Microsoft’s Big Data strategy, the distribution is now being touted as an easy migration path to Azure analytics.

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MapR Wires Security Into Hadoop

What keeps CIO’s up at night? The security of their data. And in the land of big data there are all kinds of dangers like user impersonation, rogue daemons, malicious remote procedure calls and more, according to MapR Technologies, a provider of Hadoop technology. This is a huge hurdle that suppliers of enterprise-grade Hadoop have to overcome to get potential customers started on big data projects — and a problem MapR is addressing with a new solution it announced today.

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SiSense ‘Breaks the Rules of Physics’ at Big Data Conference

A new Big Data solution promises to do more than help businesses analyze massive amounts information. It’s actually “breaking the laws of physics,” said Eldad Farkash, co-founder and chief technology officer at SiSense. SiSense, a three-year-old developer of big data analytics software, announced patent-pending technology at the O’Reilly Strata + Hadoop World 2013 conference in New York City this morning.

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Microsoft Officially Releases Its Hadoop Distro For The Cloud

Microsoft has a dream — Big Data democratized through easy to use tools and a unified data platform. Quentin Clark, Microsoft’s corporate vice president, will be at Strata Conference + Hadoop World 2013 in New York City today to talk about the company’s vision. In the meantime, we’ll give you a sneak peak at the forthcoming news. We hope to have even more news to share this week.

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Cloudera, Partners Deliver Lightning Speed and Cloud to Hadoop

Cloudera isn’t into chasing Hadoop tails. “We have consistently led the market,” said Matt Brandwein, the company’s director of product marketing.He may have an argument, given that Cloudera’s Chief Architect, Doug Cutting, is credited with the creation of Hadoop … that the company introduced Cloudera Search, the first fully integrated search engine for interactive exploration of data stored in the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) and Apache HBase

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EMC Isilon: Hadooping With Us Is Free

Say you were a contestant on Jeopardy, and the answer Alex Trebek read was “EMC, Hadoop.” Chances are the question you’d buzz-in with would be “What is Pivotal?” — referring to the company EMC spun-off less than a year ago. I suspect EMC would rather not have it this way. After all, big data is a huge component of the company’s strategy, and its Isilon division provides its own offering for deploying Hadoop and analytics.