Microsoft has made a significant play for the growing Internet of Things market with the announcement of a new highly customisable cloud-based service for its Azure platform.
The company’s CEO, Satya Nadella, today revealed the launch of Microsoft Azure IoT Suite at the Microsoft Convergence 2015 event in Atlanta today, hailing the release as delivering open, scalable platforms and services that any company, from start-ups to global enterprises, can use.
“Businesses are hungry to seize new opportunities using techniques like machine learning and productive analytics,” he said, “only when businesses create a culture that empowers everyone to have access to data and insight that drive action will they be positioned to truly transform.”
Nadella said that the cloud-based Azure IoT Suite is designed to play a central part in the transformation spurred on by the IoT by giving businesses a single platform on which to build SaaS applications.
“Our aim is to bring the power of the Azure cloud and data platform together so you can drive the transformation of your business going forward,” he said.
“The most interesting thing starts to happen once you have all that data; it is the transformation in the business model around these links.
“You’re going to provide SaaS [software-as-a-service] services that go along with your services and devices.”
The Azure IoT Suite will also provide access to tools that allow predictive maintenance, asset management and remote monitoring to be carried out within the cloud, Nadella added.
“The one thing that’s going to happen with this explosion of internet-connected devices is the explosion of data that will rendezvous with the cloud,” he said.
Feeding into the new service is Azure Stream Analytics, also announced during Nadella’s address, which serves up real-time data from “things”, and will be made available from next month as a standalone service, or bundled with Azure IoT.
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