Australian consulting and technology firm, Oakton has agreed to support Microsoft HDInsight through  the company’s Big Data Partner Incubation Program. 

Big Data provides 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. 

Microsoft HDInsight is a distribution of Apache Hadoop for the Windows Azure and Windows Server platforms. It is an Enterprise-ready Hadoop service based on the Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP), enabling users to store and process data of all types for analysis, including structured, unstructured and real-time data.

Analysts can work with Microsoft Office suite of products for data discovery and analysis.

Oakton CEO Neil Wilson said, “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.

“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,” said Wilson.

Over the next few months, Oakton will work with a number of clients using HDInsight to build analytical solutions that drive these outcomes.  The solutions will showcase the benefits of adopting HDInsight to meet the challenge organisations face in dealing with the Big Data problem.

“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.