Microsoft is launching IoT Central today, a new Internet of Things (IoT) service that gives enterprises a fully managed solution for setting up their IoT..
Microsoft is launching IoT Central today, a new Internet of Things (IoT) service that gives enterprises a fully managed solution for setting up their IoT deployments without needing the in-house expertise necessary for deploying a cloud-based IoT solution from scratch. It’s basically IoT-as-a-Service.
In addition, the company is bringing its Azure Stream Analytics to edge devices, making it easier to provision new IoT devices, and it’s launching a completely new analytics service for time series data.
The two most important new services here are probably the launch of IoT Central service and the new Azure Time Series Insights tool. As Microsoft’s director of IoT Sam George told me, the idea here is to provide a number of new offerings that are complementary to the company’s existing Azure IoT Suite. While IoT gives many companies an opportunity to differentiate their services from competitors, it still takes a specialized set of skills to enable this. “While we find that IoT is a big differentiator, one of the things we’re finding in the broader market is that there is still a broad set of skill sets needed to implement IoT solutions,” George said.
IoT Central, then, is meant to simplify the deployment of these IoT solutions. “Customers here don’t need any cloud solutions expertise,” said George.
