Today we had a full-day event in Microsoft about the data offerings and possibilities in the Microsoft cloud platform – Azure. We invited our customers as well as many other companies. 22 people attended the event, and it was very successful.

First, we presented our team and our solutions. We talked about the variety of data platforms that we support and work with, such as: SQL Server, Oracle, MongoDB and Hadoop. We presented our managed services, such as: on-going administration, data disaster recovery plan and our cloud backup service. We also talked about our professional services in various fields, such as: data architecture, data migration and performance tuning. And finally, we presented our training services, such as: public and private courses, online courses and our Next Generation program.

Matan Yungman, our CTO, presented a tour of the Azure data stack. From Azure Data Lake to Azure Machine Learning and Power BI, Matan presented all the data services available in Azure, and how they all fit together. It’s really a remarkable offering. You can build a complete data processing and analytics system in the cloud, end to end.

We invited one of our customers, TipRanks, to present their system, which is built entirely on Azure. Gilad Gat, TipRanks’ CTO and co-founder, presented the system architecture and some of the challenges we had in designing and building the system. We talked about why we chose to build the system in the cloud, and why we chose Microsoft Azure. It was a wonderful demonstration of a live system running entirely in the Microsoft cloud and leveraging its benefits.

Then I presented our cloud backup service – MadeiraCUP. This is a unique offering, in which we provide an end-to-end solution for data backup in your organization. We analyze the environment and implement a backup strategy. Our solution backs up everything to the cloud, monitors activity, manages retention, validates and verifies the backups. We provide a comprehensive dashboard, so that you can view the status of your backups and the safety level of your data at any given moment. And the most important thing is that we provide SLA. When your system is down or when there is any other need to restore data, we are responsible to restore your data as fast as possible. We can restore all or part of the data, anywhere, anytime. Check it out here.

After lunch, we had two more fascinating presentations. The first was about predictive analytics using Azure Machine Learning, and it was presented by Noam Brezis, one of our senior data professionals. Noam explained what machine learning is, how it can be used to analyze historical data and predict future behavior, and how it all works in Azure. He also provided some cool examples.

Idan Cohen, co-founder at Excelando, presented Power BI, which is a very comprehensive analysis and visualization solution, including support for many data sources, lots of cool visuals, powerful tools for dashboard and report authoring, and so much more. Idan showed some really nice demos as well.

At the end of the day, I made an offer, and I would like to offer it to you too – a free consulting meeting with one of our experts. In this meeting, we will analyze your environment and provide you recommendations for improving performance, reducing costs and increasing functionality. We can also set up a free Azure account for you and guide you through the first steps of working in the cloud. If you’re interested, then contact us.

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