In much the same way that Microsoft brought spreadsheet crunching to the business world through its now-ubiquitous Excel, the company is hoping to make a similar impact with big data analysis with its new Windows Azure HDInsight service. "I think what we've always done well as a company is take hard technology problems and simplify them. So we're making Hadoop simple, and bringing it to everyone," said Eron Kelly, Microsoft general manager for the data platform group.