Cortana Intelligence Suite (CIS) is a collection of tools and services offered by Microsoft, which transforms data into intelligent actions. Cortana also offers predictive capabilities with the help of state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms.
While Power BI is a great tool, the demand for intelligent insights never reduces to seek actions and predictions. With Azure, one can leverage several options in advanced analytics by coalescing Azure services as shown below:
- Cortana Intelligence: This is an actionable and intelligence-driven suite based on advanced analytics.
- Azure HDInsight: This is a cloud Spark and Hadoop service for big data processing.
- Azure Machine Learning: This is used for predictive analytics.
- Azure Data Factory: This composes and orchestrates data services at scale.
The following image shows the usage of advanced Azure analytics capabilities along with Power BI:
Cortana works on data in Azure stores, such as Azure DB, Azure DW, and Azure Data Lake, as well as on-premise data sources such as SQL Server.
With Entity store, customers can effectively leverage Cortana and complement with data from devices as well as other systems (for example, CRM), as needed.
The following are some of the key elements of CIS:
- Azure Machine Learning
- Azure HDInsight
- Azure Stream Analytics
- Azure Data Lake
- Azure SQL Data Warehouse
- Azure Data Catalog
- Azure Data Factory
- Azure Event Hub
- Power BI
- Cortana
- Cognitive Services
- Bot Framework
The following image shows the data source (left), the information source (middle), and the decision making result (right). Here, historical information about sales is pulled from Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, Enterprise edition using Entity Store into Cortana intelligence, where cognitive services work along with data factory, processing huge amounts of data under predetermined algorithms and suggesting recommendations to the POS user screen:
A use case scenario example for CIS is a POS (Point of Sale) user asking you to check out another item, which is mostly sold along with one of the items in your shopping cart.