Azure: A cloud computing platform and infrastructure for building, deploying, and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed data centers.

Dynamics: A line of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) software applications. Microsoft Dynamics applications are delivered through a network of reselling partners who provide specialized services.

Windows Phone: A family of mobile operating systems developed by Microsoft for smartphones as the replacement successor to Windows Mobile and Zune. Windows Phone features a new user interface derived from Metro design language.

Office 365: The brand name Microsoft uses for a group of software and services subscriptions, which together provide productivity software and related services to subscribers.

SharePoint: A web-based application that integrates with Microsoft Office. SharePoint is primarily sold as a document management and storage system, but the product is highly configurable and usage varies substantially between organizations.

Big Data: A term for data sets that are so large or complex that traditional data processing applications are inadequate to deal with them.

Challenges include analysis, capture, data curation, search, sharing, storage, transfer, visualization, querying, updating and information privacy.

The term "big data" often refers simply to the use of predictive analytics, user behavior analytics, or certain other advanced data analytics methods that extract value from data, and seldom to a particular size of data set

While the term "big data" is relatively new, the act of gathering and storing large amounts of information for eventual analysis is ages old. Organizations collect data from a variety of sources, including business transactions, social media and information from sensor or machine-to-machine data.

Data streams in at an unprecedented speed and must be dealt with in a timely manner. RFID tags, sensors and smart metering are driving the need to deal with torrents of data in near-real time.

Today's data comes from multiple sources, which makes it difficult to link, match, cleanse and transform data across systems. However, it's necessary to connect and correlate relationships, hierarchies and multiple data linkages or your data can quickly spiral out of control.

Hadoop: An open source, Java-based programming framework that supports the processing and storage of extremely large data sets in a distributed computing environment.

Hadoop makes it possible to run applications on systems with thousands of commodity hardware nodes, and to handle thousands of terabytes of data.

Its distributed file system facilitates rapid data transfer rates among nodes and allows the system to continue operating in case of a node failure.