Azure and Machine Learning – Taking Dynamics 365 Data to the Next Level

As the world of information technology continues to advance, many will notice the terms “machine learning” and “artificial intelligence” cropping up over and over in podcasts, seminars and the like. There is a good reason for that. Smart systems are uniquely poised to develop incredible business intelligence by offering predictions and developing inferences about intent, based upon their ability to spot patterns and exceptions in data. In short, these systems are about to radically change the way businesses look at and handle their big data.

At Microsoft’s recent Ignite 2017 conference, audience members viewed a sneak peek of the next generation of Azure and its machine learning and analytics capabilities. In the conference, Microsoft presented 3 new components they intend to add to their Azure product, designed to provide greater flexibility and an increased choice of frameworks.

The workbench is a cross-platform client that can run on both Windows and iOS machines. The workbench focused on data preparation tasks performed by data scientists and developers. The workbench tool is able to learn clean-up and normalisation steps and repeat them at scale, thereby providing the ideal data set for modelling experimentation.

This tool is designed to manage model experimentation and training. The tool supports a variety of frameworks and offers multiple deployment choices as well. Besides tracking components such as code and data in experiments, this tool also tracks them in any models developed, keeping their entire history. In regulated environments this provides the model transparency needed over time.

This particular tool handles deployment and operations aspects by supporting hosting, versioning, management and monitoring. This tool works anywhere Docker containers work, including Azure cloud and SQL Server 2017.

Of course, the data housed in Microsoft Dynamics 365 is uniquely poised to work seamlessly with the Azure platform. By using both Dynamics 365 and Azure in tandem, companies can easily gather intelligence from their data stores, build models and make predictions, leading to a higher level of business success. Want to know more about harnessing Azure machine learning to unleash the power of data housed in your Dynamics 365 database? Contact us.