While Microsoft has offered an IoT PaaS (platform as a service) for some time through the Azure cloud, it's betting that some customers are willing to trade customization for faster time-to-market. Microsoft IoT Central is a fully managed SaaS (software as a service) that "enables powerful IoT scenarios without requiring cloud solution expertise," as Redmond says in its announcement:
Built on the Azure cloud, Microsoft IoT Central simplifies the development process and makes it easy and fast for customers to get started, making digital transformation more accessible to everyone.
Microsoft IoT Central will be available along with our existing platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solution, Azure IoT Suite, which enables deep customization and full control. This new IoT SaaS offering has the potential to dramatically increase the speed at which manufacturers can innovate and bring new products to market.
Further details on IoT Central weren't available, but it will become available over the next few months. While the initial version will apparently focus on manufacturing scenarios, expect packages for other cases, such as for logistics and retail, to emerge over time.
Microsoft made a number of other IoT announcements, including Connected Factory, a specialized version of Azure IoT Suite.
Microsoft Azure IoT Suite Connected Factory ... helps accelerate a customer’s journey to Industrie 4.0 and makes it easy to connect on-premises OPC UA and OPC Classic devices to the Microsoft cloud and get insights to help drive operational efficiencies. In addition, it enables customers to securely browse and configure factory devices from the cloud.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is introducing a new service called Azure Time Series Insights. It's supposed to automate the process of analyzing event data from IoT endpoints, which can easily consist of billions of signals:
It helps organizations discover hidden trends, spot anomalies, and conduct root-cause analysis in near real time, all without writing a single line of code through its simple and intuitive user experience. In addition, it provides rich APIs to enable companies to integrate its powerful capabilities into their existing workflows and applications.
Yet another IoT announcement concerns security. Azure IoT will now support the hardware security standards Device Identity Composition Engine (DICE) and Hardware Security Module (HSM), according to a statement. Microsoft will discuss all of its IoT announcements during the Hannover Messe industrial conference in Germany this week.
Redmond's IoT strategy bears watching amid a crowded and highly competitive market.
"Microsoft is really turning up its focus on IoT over the last few months, but it's been taking an interestingly different direction to most of the other technology vendors," says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Andy Mulholland. "Their recent focus has been more toward adding intelligence to outcomes, and ignoring the task of the so called final-mile connectivity with the management of the sensors and devices."
"In practice there are no outcomes without good quality inputs from the IoT estate, added to which controlling and managing the data inputs was seen a year or two ago as a shrewd move to control marketplaces," he adds. "In practice, the diversity of sensors, devices and networks that are required to be integrated made this a difficult area for big technology vendors to productize. However perhaps Microsoft has the key to wining marketplace control by using its long experience in working with developers."
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