During the last decade, Microsoft has consistently invested in Azure IoT and edge technologies as part of its “Intelligent Cloud and Intelligent Edge” strategy. Microsoft is one of the first platform companies to deliver an IoT SaaS, IoT PaaS, and core IoT building blocks to customers. The experience of remotely managing Windows devices helped Microsoft to build a solid IoT platform.Last month, Gartner published the Magic Quadrant for Global Industrial IoT Platforms report. Out of the 16 companies considered for the analysis, Microsoft secured a slot in the top right quadrant as a leader in the IIoT platform segment.
Here are five reasons why Microsoft is winning the industrial IoT battle:
1) Azure IoT Central as the SaaS platform
While customers can build an end-to-end IoT solution based on the foundational services available in Azure solutions, it involves complex plumbing. Azure IoT Central is ideal for customers looking to onboard their existing devices and manage them from the cloud without the need to build a custom solution. It’s a SaaS offering that abstracts Azure’s underlying IoT PaaS capabilities, making it easy for customers to derive value from the connected devices.
Azure IoT Central has a rich user experience and public-facing APIs covering the entire spectrum of IIoT, from connecting devices to building insightful dashboards. Azure IoT Central is one of the key differentiating factors for Microsoft.
2) Diverse and Rich Partner Ecosystem
An enterprise IoT solution is more than writing and deploying software to manage devices and analyzing the telemetry. It involves choosing the right hardware, integrating with legacy OT technologies, and engaging with a capable systems integration team.
Microsoft’s IIoT platform spans a wide spectrum of hardware and software offerings providing the right choice to customers. For example, the Azure Stack Edge family of devices ranges from a ruggedized, battery-operated device to a server-grade device powered by 32 vCPUs, 204 GB RAM, 2.5 TB and 2 NVIDIA A2 GPUs. Azure Stack HCI, the hyperconverged appliance, has a wide range of OEMs offering certified hardware.
As Gartner called out in the report, various IIoT players, such as PTC, GE, Siemens, ABB and Schneider, have announced that their platforms are built on Microsoft cloud, highlighting an emerging ecosystem.
The rich and vibrant hardware and software partner ecosystem is helping Microsoft deliver robust IIoT solutions.
3) Emphasis on Security
Microsoft has invested in security services such as Azure Defender for IoT, Azure Sphere and Azure RTOS that address complex security challenges often faced by enterprises.
Azure Defender for IoT delivers endpoint security for IoT devices. The platform monitors connected devices for anomalous or unauthorised activity through features like threat intelligence and behavioral analytics.
Azure Sphere is a microcontroller unit that promises secure edge-to-cloud and cloud-to-edge integration. The device is tightly integrated with Azure IoT Central and Azure IoT Hub making it easy for customers to build secure connected solutions.
Azure RTOS is a secure, real-time operating system (RTOS) for IoT and edge devices based on microcontroller units. Azure RTOS is designed to support highly constrained battery-powered devices with less than 64 KB of flash memory.
4) DevOps-friendly IoT Edge Software
Edge computing plays a vital role in industrial IoT solutions. Azure IoT Edge, an open source software from Microsoft, is designed to make developers and operators productive and efficient. It runs on both ARM64 and AMD64 platforms, acting as a conduit between the local devices and the public cloud.
Developers can write the business logic as standard Docker containers and deploy them as modules in Azure IoT Edge. Operators can integrate Azure IoT Edge with Kubernetes to manage and monitor the deployments.
Apart from the core IoT Edge platform, Microsoft has ported some of the critical components, such as Azure Stream Analytics and Azure SQL Database, to the edge. They can be easily deployed as modules in Azure IoT Edge, providing stream processing and storage at the edge.
5) Tight Integration with Data, Analytics and ML Platforms
From ingesting and processing the local telemetry data through Azure Stream Analytics to storing and processing data at scale, Azure has a rich suite of data and analytics tightly integrated with the Azure IoT platform.
Customers can ingest telemetry data from sensors that may be stored in Azure Cosmos DB or Azure Data Lake. From there, it can be leveraged to train machine learning models in Azure ML to perform predictive maintenance of devices or to deliver rich analytics through Power BI development Vietnam.
Services such as Azure Event Bus, Stream Analytics, Data Lake and Azure ML complement the IoT platform to deliver end-to-end analytics.
Forbes
