Microsoft Azure had yet another announcement to make earlier last week.The rapidly expanding enterprise cloud platform confirmed that Azure was adding a brand new cloud-based Internet of Things (IoT) services aimed at businesses.
The Redmond, Washington-based company also stated that it is rolling out a new Software as a Service (SaaS) offering, optimized to assist businesses to simplify their IoT executions without bothering about building the whole IoT infrastructure right inside the Azure cloud environment.
Dubbed the Microsoft IoT Central, expected to arrive sometime within the coming months, will allow companies to streamline the mechanism of building, as well as managing IoTdeployments for Azure customers.
Sam George, IoT director at Azure, recently stated in a blog post that Microsoft IoT Central is designed to serve as a fully managed SaaS platform for Azure users and Microsoft’s technology partners. Using this platform needs no technical expertise, he said, adding the new offering will make it much more convenient for customers and partners to deploy their IoT infrastructure on their own.
In addition, the company has also confirmed the release of two new data analytics tools. These are:
- Microsoft Azure Time Series Insights
- Microsoft Azure Stream Analytics
The first of these two offerings is a managed service designed to empower businesses to analyze billions of events generated by and IoT system, while simultaneously conducting root-cause analysis and discover glitches and anomalies in almost real time.
Meanwhile, the Azure Stream Analytics on Edge Device is basically a cloud feature meant for helping out businesses in receiving valuable data from connected IoT-enabled devices straight out of the remote corners within a network with limited or disruptive cloud connectivity.
Both these new features have been made available as previews.
Apart from the IoT Central, the Windows-maker is also prepping a big event that could see the company officially introducing the Azure IoT Suite: Connected Factory.