Microsoft Cortana Analytics Suite Targets Businesses

Microsoft has revealed plans to inject Cortana’s analytics power into the enterprise

Microsoft is to make Cortana‘s analytical capabilities available to businesses through the Cortana Analytics Suite – a platform for enterprises that Microsoft said will “transform their data into intelligent action”.

“With Cortana Analytics, we are taking years of research and innovation – spanning technology and infrastructure for advanced analytics, including capabilities like machine learning, big data storage and processing in the cloud as well as perceptual intelligence such as vision, face and speech recognition, with the goal of helping enterprise customers make better, faster decisions to accelerate their speed of business,” said Takeshi Numoto, vice president at Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprise division.

Microsoft reckons data is now the number one strategic business asset, with all of today’s data-producing devices providing new business models that enterprises can capitalise on.

“While data is pervasive, actionable intelligence from data is elusive,” added Numoto. “Our customers want to transform data to intelligent action and reinvent their business processes.

“To do this they need to more easily analyse massive amounts of data – so they can move from seeing ‘what happened’ and understanding ‘why it happened’ to predicting ‘what will happen”’and ultimately, knowing “what should I do”. Only then can they create the intelligent enterprise.”

Microsoft envisages Cortana Analytics Suite being applied to scenarios such as real-time recommendations, customer churn forecasting, fraud detection, and predictive maintenance.

The firm gave one example of how one customer is testing the cloud suite already. Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health System, the largest hospital in northern New England, is developing a remote monitoring and predictive analytics solution called ImagineCare using the Cortana Analytics Suite.

Using predictive analytics, ImagineCare will enable dynamic treatment plans based on the individual patient’s history and profile and patterns observed from large sets of data.

Cortana Analytics Suite will be available this autumn with a monthly subscription model.