Informatica & Cognizant Embrace the Microsoft Cortana Analytics Suite

This post is authored by Joseph Sirosh , Corporate Vice President of Information Management & Machine Learning at Microsoft.

Yesterday, at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC), Satya Nadella announced the Cortana Analytics Suite – a fully managed big data and advanced analytics suite that transforms data into actionable intelligence.

To give customers a rich choice of solutions, Microsoft is investing in strategic partnerships that build on and extend the Cortana Analytics platform. Today, we are delighted to announce two key partners in our effort – data integration leader Informatica and business and technology services leader Cognizant.

Microsoft is partnering with Informatica and Cognizant to provide new analytics solutions that will accelerate our customers’ time to value:

• Informatica is the leading independent data integration and enterprise information management provider with a global customer base. This partnership will allow customers to easily integrate business data from hundreds of sources into Cortana Analytics and seamlessly migrate their data integration processes to Azure. Informatica will continue to provide pre-built native integration between its products and services with those from Microsoft – for instance, the Informatica Cloud for Microsoft Azure. This will allow customers to seamlessly use the power of Cortana Analytics from their existing information management infrastructure and business processes.
• Cognizant is a leading business and advanced analytics service provider, helping customers identify and address their business critical needs. Cognizant will host its BigDecisions advanced analytics platform on Azure, integrating it with Cortana Analytics . Cognizant will deliver pre-built industry and business process solutions to address customers’ common needs. As a consulting partner, Cognizant will offer strategic advisory consulting, technology architecture and project implementation services around end-to-end information management and data analytics.

We are excited to collaborate with Informatica and Cognizant in this rapidly evolving space, and our partners share our excitement.

Informatica customers looking to adopt Azure as their strategic cloud platform stand to benefit from this partnership. To cite one example, Informatica is working with a government agency that is looking to replace their existing data centers with Azure. The agency is looking to first move their data integration layer based on Informatica PowerCenter to Azure, and the availability of PowerCenter on Azure will help accelerate this process. The move to Azure will facilitate the adoption of Azure Machine Learning and Azure SQL Data Warehouse instead of their existing on-premises solution. Additionally, the agency is looking to better support departmental solutions by using Informatica Cloud Services to integrate departmental data and processes with Azure services.

“The new era of advanced analytics is here today and together, Microsoft, Cognizant and Informatica are delivering pre-integrated, game-changing solutions for businesses to achieve more for their customers, with intelligent data driving every business action,” said Ronen Schwartz, VP and GM, Informatica Cloud.

Read more from Informatica about their announcements at WPC here.

Cognizant is working with an integrated healthcare services organization on a project that uses wearable devices to continuously monitor patients remotely. In a proof of concept, they used Azure to implement an Internet-of-Things scenario, connecting to patients’ wearable devices, collecting vital stats in near real-time and linking it to their visualization tools for nurses, doctors’ applications, emergency response system and mobile apps for patients’ family members. The new system provides useful information that was previously not available. By correlating this information with existing patient data including prior ailments, medications used, caregiver visits, etc. they can identify patterns and get much better insights into a patient's situation, helping them deliver better care and to do so in a more proactive manner.

“Our customers continue to transform into digital businesses. Our work with industry leaders Microsoft and Informatica as part of a unique end-to-end ecosystem is designed to help clients fully leverage the opportunities and benefits of enterprise analytics as part of their transformation,” said Karthik Krishnamurthy, Global Head and VP, Enterprise Analytics, Cognizant Technology Solutions. “The Cognizant BigDecisions platform helps businesses accelerate their time to value in the digital age. The work and collaboration of our 3-way alliance will enable organizations we jointly serve to enrich their customers’ experiences and prepare them for new business opportunities and transformations using advanced analytics.”

As partners, we are fully committed to fueling innovations with intelligent data analytics solutions that give customers powerful yet easy to use capabilities. Through our collaboration, Informatica, Cognizant and Microsoft will provide best of breed tools and platforms in the cloud to empower businesses to achieve more and to wow our customers.

Joseph
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