Dive Brief:

• Prices for Azure HDInsight (HDI), Microsoft's cloud-based Big Data offering, are decreasing by up to 52%, the company annouced Tuesday. Customers can use open-source engines like Hadoop, Spark, Hive, LLAP, Kafka, Storm and HBase and can install "more open source frameworks from the OSS ecosystem."
• Customers already using HDI had a 63% decline in total cost of ownership (TCO) compared to those using on-site solutions. The recent price decrease is expected to lower TCO more, but the overall decrease will go into effect on Jan. 5. 
• In addition to the HDI cost reduction, customers running code in R will see an 80% cost reduction, or $0.016 per core hour, in the surcharge for the R Server on HDI. 

Dive Insight:

Azure HDInsight allows customers to use ETL, Data Warehousing, ML and IoT. The service is partnered with Hadoop and has been around since 2013. The framework dispatches Apache Hadoop properties in the Azure cloud, providing a software for managing and analyzing Big Data.

Forrester predicts the Big Data market is set to hit $210 billion by 2020, and by 2021, an estimated $2.3 billion will be spent on Hadoop and Hadoop-related services. 

Companies are only as powerful as the data they have and what they do with it. Microsoft Azure is already a dominant player in cloud vendors, so easing Big Data management is just its latest competitive edge. But AWS took on Big Data at re:Invent this year with the announcement of DynamoDB to provide low latencies as cloud-stored data grows.

Microsoft is approaching 2018 with "an intelligent edge infused with artificial intelligence" to replace the manual necessities behind data insight. Its new phase of the "intelligent cloud" is helping steer companies to a more agile way of storing and processing troves of data.