york-hartnellThe Data Platform Group at Microsoft does a lot, from SQL Server and their Hadoopey HDInsight offering through to Business Intelligence and analytics capabilities which sit in or on top of the humble Excel spreadsheet. I’ve touched upon pieces of this whole before, in a 2009 podcast on Azure with Amitabh Srivastava (then Corporate VP with responsibility for Azure), a 2012 podcast with Piyush Lumba (Director of Product Management for Azure Data Services), and recent short pieces on PowerBI.

In this latest podcast, I talk with Quentin Clark to get a view on how the various pieces are starting to fit together. Quentin is Corporate VP with responsibility for the Data Platform Group, and our conversation quickly shows that there’s a lot going on there.

In just over half an hour we barely scratch the surface, but some of the opportunities — and some of the challenges — certainly become apparent. Maybe we can revisit some of the specific areas of opportunity in future conversations…

Image, ‘York Station approaches’, from All About Railways by F.S. Hartnell. Now in the public domain, and shared on Wikimedia Commons.