Cortana Intelligence Suite: How manufacturers can evaluate the business potential

I recently attended a Cortana Intelligence Suite (CIS) class at Microsoft in Charlotte. Inspired by the possibilities, I decided to summarize what I learned about the suite and how the components relate to each other. I intend to write a series exploring many of the products within CIS, which will include examples of a functional application within the manufacturing industry.

Cortana Intelligence Suite is Microsoft's big data, machine learning, and analytics platform. Whether you work with a company that buys "best of breed" solutions and you manually manage your data or you only have one system but you lack the ability or wherewithal to analyze it, CIS can help.

CIS is broken up into several components. Each component has an intended purpose, though you may be able to do similar functions across several elements, and you may only use a few of them for your business. Ryan Swanstrom, with Microsoft, provided our class with an intuitive way to remember the purpose of the components within CIS. I pulled the below image from their class handout, and I applied his nifty mnemonic associations in red. Starting from the bottom up...

Now I'd like to provide you with a brief introduction to each component. My future articles in this series will take a deeper dive into them individually.

Microsoft Azure

As many of you know, Azure's intent is to provide cloud hosted virtual servers, apps, and services to Microsoft's customers. Azure offers developers both Microsoft and third party tools to operate on the cloud and takes full advantage of the IoT.

Many IT organizations may scoff at ...