At the Convergence 2015 event in Atlanta, Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella announced Azure IoT Suite – an integrated offering that brings multiple Microsoft IoT assets together.
Azure IoT Suite is a cloud service that enables billing, monitoring and analytics for Internet of Things solutions. It will be offered as a preview in the coming months. According to Microsoft, The Azure IoT Suite is an integrated offering that takes advantage of all the relevant Azure capabilities to connect devices and sensors, capture diverse and voluminous data they generate, integrate and orchestrate the flow of that data, and manage, analyze and present it to the decision makers.
Traditional platform vendors like Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and SAP are investing in IoT strategy to attract enterprise customers. With Windows 10 on the client and Azure in the cloud, Microsoft is consolidating its IoT strategy. Raspberry Pi 2, a credit card sized ARM-based PC will run Windows 10 along with other Linux operating systems.
Microsoft Azure already has the key building block services for IoT developers. Currently branded as Azure IoT Services, the platform offers the following:
- Azure Event Hubs - Event Hubs is a scalable pub/sub ingestor that can intake millions of events per second to process and analyze the massive amounts of data produced by connected devices and applications.
- Azure DocumentDB - Azure DocumentDB is a NoSQL document database service designed to natively support JSON and JavaScript directly inside the database engine.
- Azure Stream Analytics - Stream Analytics is an event processing engine that helps uncover real-time insights from devices, sensors, infrastructure, applications and data.
- Azure Notification Hubs - Notification Hubs is a scalable mobile push notification engine for sending millions of messages to iOS, Android, Windows, or Kindle devices.
- Azure Machine Learning - Azure Machine Learning offers a streamlined experience for data scientists from setting up with only a web browser, to using drag and drop gestures and simple data flow graphs to set up experiments.
- Azure HDInsight - Based on Apache Hadoop, HDInsight can process unstructured or semi-structured data from web clickstreams, social media, server logs, devices and sensors, and more.
- Power BI - Power BI is a cloud service to share, collaborate and access Excel reports anywhere on any device.
Last year, Microsoft launched the preview of Azure Intelligent Systems Service, a service that makes it easier for enterprises to securely connect, manage, capture and transform machine-generated data from sensors and devices. Takeshi Numoto, corporate vice president, cloud and enterprise marketing said that the Intelligent Systems Service was a starting point while the Azure IoT Suite is its evolution and maturation.
Microsoft is also expanding its IoT Quick Start program that offers free half-day consultations customers in identifying business priorities in the IoT domain. The program involves Microsoft Consulting Services in scope a “Proof of Concept” specific to customer scenarios.
Rockwell Automation, an industrial automation company headquartered in Milwaukee, WI is using Microsoft cloud platform for its IoT deployments.