Big Data is shaking up traditional business intelligence, but that doesn’t mean the two technologies can’t thrive side by side. Herain Oberoi, the director of BI product management at Microsoft, stopped by theCUBE with Hortonworks vice president of products Bob Page to discuss how his company is reaching into the Hadoop ecosystem to bring analytics to a billion users.

According to Oberoi, Microsoft’s Big Data strategy revolves around making Hadoop more accessible for organizations and “connecting the dots” between people and insights. The software giant is pursuing these goals with a dual approach that centers on augmenting the analytical capabilities of Excel and bringing Hadoop to Windows.

Asked about his firm’s now abandoned plans to deliver an alternative Big Data framework, Oberoi says that the project was canceled two years ago after HDFS emerged as the de facto standard for batch analytics. Not to be left in the dust, Microsoft promptly teamed up with Hortonworks to establish Windows as a viable platform for Apache Hadoop and make the latter more secure and manageable along the way.

The pair’s relationship is centered primarily on open source innovation, according to Page.

“Everything we do is 100 percent open source, every piece of code we write goes back to the Apache Software Foundation – we don’t own the IP there, we want to make sure that the community owns it,” he explains. “That’s the only way that we know of that’s gonna create this ecosystem for Hadoop, this platform that is gonna de-risk any of the investments that businesses will make and you won’t have multiple Hadoops but one Hadoop and that will be the one that Apache has” and Microsoft supports.

As part of their partnership, Hortonworks and Microsoft also integrated Hadoop with Excel, which boasts improvements across the board. The latest version integrates with Office 365, provides 3D geospatial visualizations, and packs natural language search and semi-structured query capabilities that enable users to easily incorporate external data into their spreadsheets.

Click the video below to watch the full interview.