04-26-2017, 11:10 PM
Microsoft is expanding its IoT offerings, announcing three new services that augment its cloud-based Azure IoT suite. Here's what's new: The firm launched IoT Central, a new service that can deploy and manage the entirety of a company's IoT ecosystem, including the devices, cloud functionality, analytics, networks, and software. Microsoft's offering is essentially IoT-as-a-service and is one of the only solutions on the market that can manage all these aspects in full. Microsoft is also updating Azure IoT offerings. It's expanding Azure Stream Analytics, an existing platform, to edge computing systems, which analyze data where it's generated rather than in the cloud or at remote data centers. Microsoft is also launching a new tool, based on an existing Azure offering, that leverages the cloud to analyze time-series data, something commonplace in the IoT. This gives Microsoft customers more tools that allow them to analyze data more quickly than they could with the company's previous offerings.