Microsoft has unveiled IoT Central, its new IoT as a service offering designed to help in the deployment of IoT projects in the enterprise.
The offering is touted as a solution for businesses looking to roll out IoT in their networks but who don’t have in-house expertise. While Microsoft already has its Azure IoT Suite, IoT Central can be used with the former to customize a network, as well as allowing complete control over it.
In a blog post Sam George, partner director of Azure IoT at Microsoft, said: “The Internet of Things (IoT) is quickly becoming a critical aspect of doing business. In the same way that web, mobile and cloud technologies have powered digital transformation, IoT is the next big catalyst.”
“Yet while IoT brings a new set of benefits for companies that want to keep an edge on their competition, it brings challenges too — IoT solutions can still be complex, and a shortage of skills makes it difficult for everyone to take advantage of this new innovation.”
He added that the IoT solution will “dramatically increase” the speed at which manufacturers can innovate and bring new products to market, as well as lower the barriers to creating IoT solutions that generate new revenue opportunities and better experiences for customers.
The service will be rolling out more publicly over the coming months.
Microsoft Azure Stream Analytics
Microsoft also announced its Azure Stream Analytics (ASA) for edge device. In a blog post, Santosh Balasubramanian, principal program manager at Azure Stream Analytics, said that the features would help customers use analytical intelligence closer to their IoT devices.
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“With ASA on edge devices, we are offering the power of our Complex Event Processing (CEP) solution on edge devices to easily develop and run real-time analytics on multiple streams of data,” he said.
He added that one of the key benefit of this feature is the seamless integration with the cloud: users can develop, test, and deploy their analytics from the cloud, using the same SQL-like language for both cloud and edge analytics jobs.
“Like in the cloud, this SQL language notably enables temporal-based joins, windowed aggregates, temporal filters, and other common operations such as aggregates, projections, and filters. Users can also seamlessly integrate custom code in JavaScript for advanced scenarios,” said Balasubramanian.
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