Eron Kelly, Microsoft’s general manager for SQL Server product marketing, and John Kreisa VP Strategic Marketing at Hortonworks join John Furrier and Dave Vellante in theCUBE for our #BigDataSV event. Kelly and Kreisa discuss the Microsoft/Hortonworks partnership as Furrier and Vellante inquire about what makes this new collaboration unique and fruitful.

Tomorrow, Microsoft will be announcing that Windows Azure HDInsight now supports Hadoop 2.2. Hortonworks leads development of Hadoop, but as part of Microsoft’s work with Hortonworks to build Windows Azure HDInsight, Microsoft contributes code back to the open source community. Microsoft will also announce Stinger Phase Two with query optimization and compression technology. Kelly notes that these new solutions have yielded “Forty times performance improvements around query.” Kreisa adds that the goal is to first bring Hadoop to Windows, then the cloud and Azure. He adds that these new solutions allow for multiple workloads on a single Hadoop cluster.

Furrier inquires about YARN, which Kreisa describes as a “maturing technology.” YARN allows different technologies to integrate natively and use the resources within the cluster more effectively. In general, YARN affords companies to reduce their node usage.

Microsoft previously shared the noble goal of “bring Big Data to a billion users.” Furrier asks has this aim shifted at all. Kelly says that this same objective remains. He cites an example of buses in Barcelona to explain how Big Data analytics effects everyday citizens. In Barcelona, after a major concert, several bus commuters tweeted about the bus slowness. Using Hadoop and Power BI for Office 365, the city picked up on the sentiment data and the transit authority was able to re-organize the transportation system for the commuters.

Kreisa and Kelly also discuss future trends concerning data. Kreisa suggests that many people are still wanting to get multiple access points into the data lake, noting: “The more that we can enable the existing skill-sets the better.” The key is to harness PolyBase or other technologies that will enable multiple approaches. Kreisa adds: “The data has gravity, so people don’t want to necessarily move it. So, the hybrid environment will be making that a stronger tighter innovation.”

The discussants agree that 2014 will be an incredible year for Big Data technology. Kelly concludes: “2014 really looks good in the sense that not only is the market hot, but customers are very interested in making this technology work…When I talk to our salespeople the momentum we have right now is phenomenal because customers have dollars and real interest.”

You can watch live coverage of SiliconANGLE’s #BigDataSV at SiliconANGLE.tv