Nadella takes a dig at Amazon as Microsoft unveils Azure Purview

Taking an apparent dig at Amazon and its Cloud arm AWS, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has said that it is important to not only trust a vendors technology capabilities but also its ‘business model alignment with its customers.

"No customer wants to be dependent on a provider that sells them technology on one end, and competes with them on the other. It's never been more important to get this equation right," Nadella said during the ‘Shape Your Future with Azure Data and Analytics' virtual conference late on Thursday.

The tech giant unveiled new Cloud technologies during the event as it competes against AWS, Google and others in the $25 billion global market for data analytics and business intelligence (according to a recent Gartner report).

One of the new Cloud offerings is Azure Purview -- a unified data governance service that helps organisations achieve a complete understanding of their data.

"Azure Purview helps discover all data across your organisation, track lineage of data, and create a business glossary wherever it is stored: on-premises, across clouds, in SaaS applications, and in Microsoft Power BI," according to Julia While, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Azure.

"With Azure Purview, you can view your data estate pivoting on classifications and labeling and drill into assets containing sensitive data across on-premises, multi-cloud, and multi-edge locations," she said.

The company has taken a new approach to analytics in Azure.

"We rearchitected our operational and analytics data stores to take full advantage of a new, cloud-native architecture. This fundamental shift, while maintaining consistent tools and languages, is what enables the long-held silos to be eliminated across skills, technology, and data," White explained.

Another offering called Azure Synapse Analytics is a limitless analytics service that brings together data integration, enterprise data warehousing, and Big Data analytics into a single service offering unmatched time to insights.

With Azure Synapse, organisations can run the full gamut of analytics projects and put data to work much more quickly, productively, and securely, generating insights from all data sources, the company said.

The combination of Azure Synapse Analytics and Azure Purview will empower organisations to invent with purpose by developing the capabilities to achieve both analytical power and predictive power, Microsoft said.