Microsoft Azure has set its sights on more data analytics workloads, at a time when organizations amass huge amounts of data and are looking at low-cost data analytics up in the cloud.
And Redmond is doing all it can to shine the spotlight on its data analytics services.
Despite playing second fiddle to Amazon in the cloud computing domain, the company has been making some big moves via consumer-friendly developments in recent months. Including, optimization efforts that are leading to greater cost/benefit metrics for customers.
This is what corporate vice president of Azure, Julia White, talks about in a recent blog post, where she made it a point to highlight these efforts:
“In the most recent study by GigaOm, they found that Azure SQL Data Warehouse is now outperforming the competition up to a whopping 14x times. No one else has produced independent, industry-accepted benchmarks like these. Not AWS Redshift or Google BigQuery. And the best part? Azure is up to 94 percent cheaper.”
Best part indeed.
Even better, one may argue, is the fact that these price-performance improvements are also being applied across Azure Data Lake Storage and Azure Databricks, in addition to updates to cloud security and industry analytics.
Obviously, Azure Data Lake Storage very recently achieved general availability, as the first cloud storage that combines the best of hierarchical files system and blob storage.
Guess one can say that being number two in an all-or-nothing race comes with its advantages. Microsoft is forced to compete on multiple vectors, and innovate faster and further, in order to attain mindshare and user satisfaction.
Hard to say no to that.
