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Microsoft Azure Offers HDInsight (Hadoop-as-a-service) to China

Microsoft today announced that Azure HDInsight is now available for all customers in China as a public preview, making it the first global cloud provider to have a publicly available cloud Hadoop offering in China. With this launch, Microsoft is bringing Azure HDInsight’s ability to process big data volumes from unstructured and semi-structured sources to China. Both local Chinese organizations and multi-national corporations with offices in China can spin up a Hadoop cluster within minutes. 

Hadoop is an open-source platform for storing and processing massive amounts of data. By using Hadoop alongside your traditional data architecture, you can gain deep insights into data you never imagined being able to access.  As an example, Blackball, a Taiwanese Tea and Dessert restaurant chain was able to combine traditional data from its point-of-sale systems with new data from social sentiment and weather feeds to understand why a customer would purchase their products.  By combining traditional sources with new “Big Data”, Blackball found out that hot/cold weather was not really a factor in its sales of hot/cold drinks and was able to adjust accordingly to customer demand.

It is these types of results that are causing a wave of demand for big data. We invite you to try HDInsight today either in China or across the other Azure data centers. 

Learn more through the following resources: