ITWire

Oakton CEO, Neil Wilson, said being selected to participate in Microsoft’s Big Data Partner Incubation Program demonstrated Oakton’s “very close working relationship with Microsoft, both in Australia and with Microsoft’s thought leaders at their Corporate HQ in the USA.”

“Oakton has a long history of delivering high quality information management, business intelligence and analytics solutions to Australian clients.   At a time of significant financial challenge and uncertainty for many companies in Australia, Oakton will be able to take advantage of Microsoft’s Big Data technology to help them gain greater analytical insights that will help drive better business outcomes in terms of competitiveness, efficiency and profitability.”

Wilson said Big Data provided a solution to a number of contemporary business challenges, including the “sheer volume of data organisations have to deal with, the speed at which data arrives and the variety of data that has to be processed.”  

“All this data contains a wealth of business information, but it is only as valuable as the insights organisations can gain from it and the business benefits this can drive.”

“Historically, gaining this type of insight has been the preserve of expert users working with specialist tools and has required significant investment.  Microsoft HDInsight lowers the barrier to entry into analytics for many organisations by providing a cost effective, scalable solution with familiar end user tools,” Wilson said.

Wilson said Microsoft HDInsight gave organisations the option of adopting cloud based technology, working with their data on premise or a combination of both.  “It allows end users to work with Microsoft Office suite of products, which are the tools they are already using for data discovery and analysis.”

“Microsoft HDInsight will allow customers to run Hadoop on Windows Server and on Windows Azure,” said Bob Baker, Director, Microsoft Server and Tools Marketing.

“Combined with the business intelligence capabilities of SQL Server and Microsoft Office, HDInsight enables customers to obtain great insight from structured and unstructured data. We see the services market around these capabilities as growing rapidly and Oakton is well positioned to execute here.”