Azure IoT’s industrial transformation strategy on display at Hannover Messe 2024

Running and transforming a successful enterprise is like being the coach of a championship-winning sports team. To win the trophy, you need a strategy, game plans, and the ability to bring all the players together. In the early days of training, coaches relied on basic drills, manual strategies, and simple equipment. But as technology advanced, so did the art of coaching. Today, coaches use data-driven training programs, performance tracking technology, and sophisticated game strategies to achieve unimaginable performance and secure victories.

We see a similar change happening in industrial production management and performance and we are excited to showcase how we are innovating with our products and services to help you succeed in the modern era. Microsoft recently launched two accelerators for industrial transformation:

◉ Azure’s adaptive cloud approach—a new strategy

◉ Azure IoT Operations (preview)—a new product

Our adaptive cloud approach connects teams, systems, and sites through consistent management tools, development patterns, and insight generation. Putting the adaptive cloud approach into practice, IoT Operations leverages open standards and works with Microsoft Fabric to create a common data foundation for IT and operational technology (OT) collaboration.

We will be demonstrating these accelerators in the Microsoft booth at Hannover Messe 2024, presenting the new approach on the Microsoft stage, and will be ready to share exciting partnership announcements that enable interoperability in the industry.  

Experience the future of automation with IoT Operations 

Using our adaptive cloud approach, we’ve built a robotic assembly line demonstration that puts together car battery parts for attendees of the event. This production line is partner-enabled and features a standard OT environment, including solutions from Rockwell Automation and PTC. IoT Operations was used to build a monitoring solution for the robots because it embraces industry standards, like Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture (OPC UA), and integrates with existing infrastructure to connect data from an array of OT devices and systems, and flow it to the right places and people. IoT Operations processes data at the edge for local use by multiple applications and sends insights to the cloud for use by multiple applications there too, reducing data fragmentation.  

For those attending Hannover Messe 2024, head to the center of the Microsoft booth and look for the station “Achieve industrial transformation across the value chain.”  

Consult with Azure experts on IT and OT collaboration tools 

Find out how Microsoft Azure’s open and standardized strategy, an adaptive cloud approach, can help you reach the next stage of industrial transformation. Our experts will help your team collect data from assets and systems on the shop floor, compute at the edge, integrate that data into multiple solutions, and create production analytics on a global scale. Whether you’re just starting to connect and digitize your operations, or you’re ready to analyze and reason with your data, make predictions, and apply AI, we’re here to assist.  

For those attending Hannover Messe 2024, these experts are located at the demonstration called “Scale solutions and interoperate with IoT, edge, and cloud innovation.” 

Check out Jumpstart to get your collaboration environment up and running. In May 2024, Jumpstart will have a comprehensive scenario designed for manufacturing.

Attend a presentation on modernizing the shop floor  

We will share the results of a survey on the latest trends, technologies, and priorities for manufacturing companies wanting to efficiently manage their data to prepare for AI and accelerate industrial transformation. 73% of manufacturers agreed that a scalable technology stack is an important paradigm for the future of factories. To make that a reality, manufacturers are making changes to modernize, such as adopting containerization, shifting to central management of devices, and emphasizing IT and OT collaboration tools. These modernization trends can maximize the ROI of existing infrastructure and solutions, enhance security, and apply AI at the edge. 

This presentation “How manufacturers prepare shopfloors for a future with AI,” will take place in the Microsoft theater at our booth, Hall 17, on Monday, April 22, 2024, at 2:00 PM CEST at Hannover Messe 2024.  

Learn about actions and initiatives driving interoperability  

Microsoft is strengthening and supporting the industrial ecosystem to enable at-scale transformation and interoperate solutions. Our adaptive cloud approach both incorporates existing investments in partner technology and builds a foundation for consistent deployment patterns and repeatability for scale.  

Our ecosystem of partners

Microsoft is building an ecosystem of connectivity partners to modernize industrial systems and devices. These partners provide data translation and normalization services across heterogeneous environments for a seamless and secure data flow on the shop floor, and from the shop floor to the cloud. We leverage open standards and provide consistent control and management capabilities for OT and IT assets. To date, we have established integrations with Advantech, Softing, and PTC. 

Siemens and Microsoft have announced the convergence of the Digital Twin Definition Language (DTDL) with the W3C Web of Things standard. This convergence will help consolidate digital twin definitions for assets in the industry and enable new technology innovation like automatic asset onboarding with the help of generative AI technologies.

Microsoft embraces open standards and interoperability. Our adaptive cloud approach is based on those principles. We are thrilled to join project Margo, a new ecosystem-led initiative, that will help industrial customers achieve their digital transformation goals with greater speed and efficiency. Margo will define how edge applications, edge devices, and edge orchestration software interoperate with each other with increased flexibility.

Discover solutions with Microsoft

Visit our booth and speak with our experts to reach new heights of industrial transformation and prepare the shop floor for AI. Together, we will maximize your existing investments and drive scale in the industry. We look forward to working with you.

◉ Azure IoT Operations

◉ Azure IoT

◉ Hannover Messe 2024

Source: microsoft.com

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Microsoft Azure delivers purpose-built cloud infrastructure in the era of AI

This year’s Microsoft Ignite brings us together to experience AI transformation in action. AI is driving a new wave of innovation, rapidly changing what applications look like, how they’re designed and built, and how they’re delivered. At the same time, business leaders continue to face challenges, needing to juggle various priorities to offset rising costs, be sustainable, and outmaneuver economic uncertainty. Today’s customers are looking for AI solutions that will meet all their needs.

At Ignite, we’re announcing innovation in Microsoft Azure that is powering more AI capabilities for our customers and helping enterprises with their cloud management and operations. We’re committed to bringing your AI ambitions to production and meeting you where you are. Whether you choose to build hybrid, cloud-native, or open source solutions, we’re rapidly expanding our infrastructure and adding intuitive tools for customers to help take your ideas to production safely and responsibly in this new era of AI. 

With Azure, you can trust that you are on a secure and well-managed foundation to utilize the latest advancements in AI and cloud-native services. Azure is adaptive and purpose-built for all your workloads, helping you seamlessly unify and manage all your infrastructure, data, analytics, and AI solutions. 

Powering groundbreaking AI solutions

The era of AI has largely been shaped by an exponential growth in the sophistication of large language models like OpenAI’s GPT trained on trillions of parameters and groundbreaking generative AI services like Bing Chat Enterprise and Microsoft Copilot used by millions of people globally. The leadership by Azure in optimizing infrastructure for AI workloads in the cloud is pioneering this innovation and why customers like OpenAI, Inflection, and Adept are choosing Azure to build and run AI solutions.

In this new era of AI, we are redefining cloud infrastructure, from silicon to systems, to prepare for AI in every business, in every app, for everyone. At Ignite, we’re introducing our first custom AI accelerator series, Azure Maia, designed to run cloud-based training and inferencing for AI workloads such as OpenAI models, Bing, GitHub Copilot, and ChatGPT. Maia 100 is the first generation in the series, with 105 billion transistors, making it one of the largest chips on 5nm process technology. The innovations for Maia 100 span across the silicon, software, network, racks, and cooling capabilities. This equips the Azure AI infrastructure with end-to-end systems optimization tailored to meet the needs of groundbreaking AI such as GPT.

Alongside the Maia 100, we’re introducing our first custom in-house central processing unit series, Azure Cobalt, built on Arm architecture for optimal performance or watt efficiency, powering common cloud workloads for the Microsoft Cloud. From in-house silicon to systems, Microsoft now optimizes and innovates at every layer in the infrastructure stack. Cobalt 100, the first generation in the series, is a 64-bit 128-core chip that delivers up to 40 percent performance improvement over current generations of Azure Arm chips and is powering services such as Microsoft Teams and Azure SQL. 

Networking innovation runs across our first-generation Maia 100 and Cobalt 100 chips. From hollow core fiber technology to the general availability of Azure Boost, we’re enabling faster networking and storage solutions in the cloud. You can now achieve up to 12.5 GBs throughput, 650K input output operations per second (IOPs) in remote storage performance to run data-intensive workloads, and up to 200 GBs in networking bandwidth for network-intensive workloads. 

We continue to build our AI infrastructure in close collaboration with silicon providers and industry leaders, incorporating the latest innovations in software, power, models, and silicon. Azure works closely with NVIDIA to provide NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core (GPU) graphics processing unit-based virtual machines (VMs) for mid to large-scale AI workloads, including Azure Confidential VMs. On top of that, we are adding the latest NVIDIA H200 Tensor Core GPU to our fleet next year to support larger model inferencing with no reduction in latency. 

As we expand our partnership with AMD, customers can access AI-optimized VMs powered by AMD’s new MI300 accelerator early next year. This demonstrates our commitment to adding optionality for customers in price, performance, and power for all of their unique business needs. 

These investments have allowed Azure to pioneer performance for AI supercomputing in the cloud and have consistently ranked us as the number one cloud in the top 500 of the world’s supercomputers. With these additions to the Azure infrastructure hardware portfolio, our platform enables us to deliver the best performance and efficiency across all workloads.

Being adaptive and purpose-built for your workloads

We’ve heard about your challenges in migrating workloads to the public cloud, especially for mission-critical workloads. We continue to work with the technology vendors you’ve relied on to run your workloads and ensure Azure is supporting your needs such as SAP, VMware, NetApp, RedHat, Citrix, and Oracle. We’re excited about our recent partnership to bring Oracle Database Services into Azure to help keep your business efficient and resilient.

At Ignite, we’re announcing the general availability of Oracle Database@Azure in the US East Azure region as of December 2023. Customers will now have direct access to Oracle database services running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) deployed in Azure data centers. The new service will deliver all the performance, scale, and workload availability advantages of Oracle Exadata Database Service on OCI combined with the security, flexibility, and best-in-class services of Azure. Microsoft is the only other hyper scaler to offer OCI Database Services to simplify cloud migration, multicloud deployment, and management.

As we’ve observed through our interactions the durable state of the cloud is evolving to one where customer workloads need to be supported wherever they’re needed. We realize that cloud migration is not a one-size-fits-all approach, and that’s why we’re committed to meeting you where you are on your cloud journey. An adaptive cloud enables you to thrive in dynamic environments by unifying siloed teams, distributed sites, and sprawling systems into a single operations, application, and data model in Azure.  

Our vision for adaptive cloud builds on the work we’ve already started through Azure Arc. With Azure Arc, customers can project their on-premises, edge, and multicloud resources to Azure, deploy Azure native services on those resources, and extend Azure services to the edge.  

We’re excited to make some new announcements that will help customers implement their adaptive cloud strategies. For VMware customers, we’re announcing the general availability of VMware vSphere enabled by Azure Arc. Azure Arc brings together Azure and the VMware vSphere infrastructure enabling VM administrators to empower their developers to use Azure technologies with their existing server-based workloads and new Kubernetes workloads all from Azure. Additionally, we’re delighted to share the preview of Azure IoT Operations enabled by Azure Arc. By using Azure IoT Operations, customers can greatly reduce the complexity and time it takes to build an end-to-end solution that empowers them to make near real-time decisions backed by AI-driven insights to run agile, resilient, and sustainable operations with both Microsoft and partner technologies.

Amplifying your impact with AI-enhanced operations

Every day, cloud administrators and IT professionals are being asked to do more. We consistently hear from customers that they’re tasked with a wider range of operations, collaborating and managing more users, supporting more complex needs to deliver on increasing customer demand and integrating more workloads into their cloud environment. 

That’s why we’re excited to introduce the public preview of Microsoft Copilot for Azure, a new solution built into Azure that helps simplify how you design, operate, or troubleshoot apps and infrastructure from cloud to edge.

Enabling limitless innovation in the era of AI

Delivering on the promise of advanced AI for our customers requires high computing infrastructure, services, and expertise—things that can only be addressed with the scale and agility of the Microsoft Cloud. Our unique equipment and system designs help us and customers like you meet the challenges of the ever-changing technological landscape. From increasing the lifecycle of our hardware and running efficient supply chain operations to providing purpose-built infrastructure in this new era of AI, we can ensure we’re always here to bring your ideas to life in a safe and responsible way.

Source: microsoft.com

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Connecting urban environments with IoT and Digital Twins

As urbanization continues to take hold and cities face challenges to become more sustainable and livable, urban planning and operations strategies must adapt. The current pandemic has changed the way we live, accelerating cities’ future vision as a necessity of the present and what it means to live in a connected and resilient urban environment. Now more than ever, public and private organizations are coming together to push transformative solutions and change the way we plan and operate infrastructure and urban environments for all.

Microsoft, along with its partner ecosystem, continues to be deeply engaged with cities and communities around the world by providing capabilities and solutions that span the intelligent cloud and edge, advancing of AI driven by ethical principles, and continuing commitment to trust and security. Earlier this year, IDC MarketScape recognized Microsoft as the leading worldwide IoT application platform for Smart Cities, highlighting its secure, mature, and capable Azure IoT, AI, and Digital Twins services. In addition to IDC, Guidehouse Insights also recognized Microsoft as the leader in its leaderboard for Smart Cities platform suppliers, highlighting Azure’s ability to support a broad portfolio of smart city solutions using common platform technologies.

As cities continue to invest in connected solutions, a study by ESI ThoughtLab on hyperconnected cities shows that as solutions become more interlinked their return on investment (ROI) grows. To unlock their full economic, social, environmental, and business value, cities need to use digital technologies to transform and interconnect key areas of their ecosystem—from roads to cars, buildings to energy grids, citizens to government, and cities to cities. Microsoft’s focus to deliver new technology innovations in IoT, AI and Digital Twins is enabling connected solution integration that drives breakthrough insights and experiences from planning to operations of urban environments and their infrastructure.

Towards connected urban environments

The concept of digital twins—a digital model and representation of real-world environment brought to life with real time data from sensors and other data sources—has entered the realm of smart cities and promises to enable city administrations and urban planners to make better decisions with the help of data integration and visualization from across the urban space. While urban planners have already been using 2D and 3D models and computer-aided design for years, the integration of real-time data from IoT devices, location, weather, traffic, people movement, and other sources has been a gamechanger for urban planning and operations.

Earlier this year, we announced an update to Azure Digital Twins platform which enables modeling and creating digital representations of connected environments like buildings, factories, farms, energy networks, railways, stadiums, and cities, then bring these entities to life with a live execution environment that integrates IoT and other data sources. To drive openness and interoperability, Azure Digital Twins comes with an open modeling language, Digital Twins Definition Language (DTDL), which provides flexibility, ease of use, and integration into the rest of the Azure platform. Furthermore, to enable urban experiences that are geospatially aware, Azure Maps provides several geospatial services including access to real-time traffic, public transit, and weather data.

City and infrastructure operations

Modeling the complex interactions and high-value intersections between people, places, and things is unlocking new opportunities, creating new efficiencies, and improving public and private spaces.

Siemens MindSphere City Graph is a solution that offers a new way to optimize city operations. It creates a digital twin of urban spaces allowing cities to model, monitor, and control physical infrastructure. Through the integration of IoT data, legacy systems, and other data sources, stakeholders of a city gain insights and understand changes as they happen. MindSphere City Graph provides the openness for solution providers to integrate and deliver sustainable value for a city while enabling open data for cities through an open standard approach.

MindSphere City Graph uses Azure Digital Twins to build digital models of entire environments within an urban space and bring these digital twins to life in a live execution environment with integration of real-time data. City Graph uses the open Digital Twins Definition Language (DTDL) to model the environment and enable interoperability leveraging Smart City standards. The first deployment has been successfully rolled out in Aspern with Aspern Smart City Research (ASCR) by Siemens Advanta and focused on the improved forecasting of the charging demand of eCars and the understanding of their impact on the energy infrastructure.

Available charging poles for one location and forecasted heat map of charge point availability.

We are excited to share that MindSphere City Graph was honored with the World Smart City 2020 Award in the Urban Environment category during this year’s Smart City Live Expo, which recognizes the most innovative and successful projects being implemented and developed for urban environments. The award is a prestigious international competition to recognize groundbreaking projects, ideas, and strategies that make cities around the world more livable, sustainable, and economically viable.

We are also excited to share that Aspern Smart City Research (ASCR) has been honored with the IDC 2020 Smart Cities and Communities Europe and Central Asia Awards in the Resilient Infrastructure category, made possible by MindSphere City Graph based on Azure Digital Twins. The award is the first of its kind recognizing technology-enabled, groundbreaking and innovative projects, that deliver citizen-centric outcomes. 

Urban and infrastructure planning

Digital cities are embracing a data-driven approach from planning to performance, leveraging digital twins for operating city infrastructure, urban planning, visualization, and simulation, to support infrastructure resilience and enhance stakeholder collaboration and resident engagement.

Bentley Systems provides the architectural and engineering solutions used to design, build, and operate much of the world’s infrastructure. In the world of infrastructure development, complex computer-aided design (CAD) data is the backbone of planning, execution, and operation of major infrastructures, such as road and rail networks, public works, and utilities. Bentley’s iTwin platform captures geometry and metadata of a project and its environment as the source of truth that drives daily decisions throughout its lifecycle. Using Azure Digital Twins, Bentley can bring these infrastructure backbones to life through the integration of real-time IoT data, enabling iTwin users to visualize operational data, time-series data, and analytics in rich, contextual 3D and 4D models, reducing the time it takes to assemble a complete picture of the present and future.

With Bentley’s OpenCities Planner digital cities can use reality modeling to rapidly build a highly precise 3D geometric model of existing infrastructure and combine with engineering data to perform 3D spatial analysis and visualization during all the stages of infrastructure lifecycle at a city level. Bentley Systems and Microsoft recently announced an alliance to accelerate infrastructure digital twin innovations and scale advancements for urban planning and smart cities.

Smart streetlights: core infrastructure for smart city solutions

Streetlights are uniquely positioned in the transformation of the urban environment. Combined with LED conversion, smart lighting has been recognized as one of the most actionable and ready-to-implement technologies for cities to transition to a low-carbon economy in the next decade. Smart streetlights have widely demonstrated ROI for reduced energy consumption and maintenance spending. Streetlights, once networked, are also increasingly being used as a platform for other smart city applications including public safety, air quality and environmental monitoring, connectivity, EV charging, and parking.

Schréder, a worldwide leader in outdoor lighting present in over 70 countries across the globe, sees lighting as a backbone to building a truly smart city. It has built a cloud-native smart Lighting Management platform, Schréder EXEDRA, that can remotely monitor and analyze streetlights leveraging Azure and Azure IoT as a core platform for its highest levels of trust, transparency, standards conformance, and regulatory compliance. With this new platform, city managers can gain flexibility, energy savings, and the ability to manage their assets. They are able to dim the streetlight brightness according to specific needs, generate and manage tickets, easily create reports, and interact with other sensors and devices installed in public spaces.

ENE.HUB, a subsidiary of Brookfield Infrastructure Partners, is a fully integrated smart city infrastructure as a service provider. ENE.HUB’s flagship product, SMART.NODE™ is a comprehensive and self-contained smart pole solution that discretely integrates a range of smart city services including smart LED lighting, communication services, energy services, environment services, transport services, safety, and media services. The data gathered is integrated through a central management system and analytics platform built on Azure allowing users to control, interact and analyze real-time data to enable responsive action and keep cities and public spaces efficient, safe, and vibrant.

Dimonoff, which has 14 years of expertise in controlling and remote management of connected assets like streetlights, works closely with infrastructure managers of cities, university campuses, as well as real estate development companies and lighting manufacturers, to guarantee the full implementation of largely scalable smart solutions. Dimonoff has worked on multiple citywide deployments of streetlight controls. Dimonoff SCMS runs on Microsoft Azure and enables facility and site managers to automate the control, monitoring, and maintenance management of streetlights and other assets, increasing the sustainability of their infrastructure.

Interoperability with DTDL

Common representation of places, infrastructure, and assets will be paramount for interoperability and enabling data sharing between multiple domains. The Digital Twins Definition Language (DTDL) is an open modeling language to describe models and interfaces for digital twins: the telemetry they emit, the properties they report or synchronize, the commands they respond to, and the relationship between them.

Starting with Smart Building solutions we partnered with RealEstateCore to release the DTDL-based RealEstateCore ontology which provides common ground for modeling smart buildings leveraging well-established industry standards, accelerates developers time to results, and enables interoperability between DTDL-based solutions from different solution providers. Similarly, we are working with our partners for DTDL based smart cities ontologies starting with ETSI CIM NGSI-LD models which have been adopted by organizations like OASC.

Smart buildings, energy, and sustainability

From cities to campuses, now more than ever, buildings of all kinds, from commercial offices to public buildings and more, remain in need of transformative solutions that will enable people and communities to work and live safely. At Microsoft, we continue to push innovation forward to unlock the full potential of smart buildings that will not only allow the reopening of buildings, but provide lasting value for property owners, managers, tenants, and occupants which in turn enables cities to build back resilient with thriving communities. We also continue to demonstrate the next level of energy efficiency by delivering innovative projects. For example, enabling buildings to be distributed energy resources to power them with green energy generated from their own rooftops that reduces carbon footprint and utility bills, using cutting-edge AI with project Bonsai to optimize the energy usage to new heights.

Smart City Live Expo

Microsoft will be at the Smart City Live Expo, an annual gathering for urbanization, to connect smart city technologies and partners with cities on a digital transformation journey. One of the key themes for this year will be on how technology can help cities continue to meet new challenges, both today and in the future.

Source: microsoft.com

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Azure IoT Central: Democratizing IoT for all solution builders

For the last five years, our industry has buzzed with the promises of IoT. IoT has evolved from being a next-horizon term, to a common vernacular employed across industry conversations. In fact, earlier this year we surveyed 3,000 enterprise decision makers across the world and learned that 85% have developed at least one IoT project. Across four major industries (manufacturing, retail, healthcare, and government), more than 84% of enterprise decision makers consider IoT “critical” to success

Despite this near consensus, the average maturity of production-level IoT projects remains extremely low. Over 90% of companies experience some failure in the proof of concept stage due to concerns and knowledge gaps around how to scale their solutions securely, reliably, and affordably. This finding is not surprising. Scaling a project not only increases the cost, it also introduces significant technical complexity—from knowing how to adapt an architecture as the number of connected devices grows to millions, to ensuring your security remains robust as your breachable footprint expands.

Having worked with thousands of IoT customers, our engineers have encountered these issues time and time again. We used these learnings to evolve Azure IoT Central and help solution builders avoid common pitfalls that prevent many projects from moving beyond the proof of concept stage. We explained these findings in our new report, “8 attributes of successful IoT solutions,” to help IoT solution builders ask the right questions upfront as they design their systems, and help them select the right technology platforms.

A fully managed IoT app platform

Azure IoT Central is our IoT app platform for solution builders (such as ISVs, SIs, and Azure IoT Central helps you connect your devices, manage devices and generate insights and bring insights into your business applications. OEMs), to design, deploy, and manage enterprise-grade solutions that they can brand and sell to their customers, either directly or through Microsoft AppSource.

Azure IoT Central provides a complete and robust platform that handles the “plumbing” of IoT solutions. It is by no means an end-to-end solution. The value of IoT Central is brought to life when solution builders leverage it to connect and manage their devices, as well as to extend device insights into their line of business applications. This allows solution builders to spend their time and energy in their area of expertise, transforming their businesses through value-adding and brand-differentiating elements. With whitelabeling, solution builders can go to market with a resulting solution that reflects their brand. While many customers choose to design and build cloud solutions using individual Azure services (a Platform as a Service, or PaaS, approach), Azure IoT Central reduces the cost of building and maintaining a PaaS-based solution by providing a fully managed platform.

Today we’re announcing several major updates to Azure IoT Central. We’re confident these updates will inspire builders to develop industry-leading solutions with the peace of mind that their applications rest on a secure, reliable, and scalable infrastructure–enabling them to connect and manage devices, generate insights, and bring those new insights into their existing applications.

New app templates for industry-focused enablement

Today we are releasing 11 new industry app templates, designed to illustrate the types of solutions our partners and customers can build across retail, healthcare, government, and energy.

Innovative partners using Azure IoT across industries

From startups to established leaders, we are seeing solution builders across industries leverage Azure IoT Central to transform their industries.

One area where we're seeing solution builders use Azure IoT Central to design innovative solutions is healthcare. Every 20 seconds a limb is lost to diabetes. To tackle this issue, Seattle-based startup, Sensoria Health joined forces with leading orthopedic medical footwear manufacturer, Optima Molliter, to launch an IoT solution that enables continuous, remote monitoring of patients recovering from diabetic foot ulcers. Patients and physicians can leverage the Sensoria Core solution, a hub utilizing IoT and artificial intelligence (AI) based on telemetry from Optima footwear, to monitor real-time patient adherence to clinician recommendations via a mobile app.

Physicians can leverage the clinician dashboard, which provides a holistic view of their patient population, to manage patient interactions, understand patient adherence to recommendations over time, and to decide which patients are in most need of care at a given moment. By enabling real-time alerts, physicians can manage care escalation decisions to expedite the healing of foot wounds and reduce the risk of amputations. Azure IoT Central provided the IoT application infrastructure that allowed Sensoria to quickly build a globally available, secure, and scalable IoT solution. Furthermore, Azure IoT Central leverages Azure API for FHIR, enabling Sensoria Health to ensure healthcare interoperability and compliance standards are met when managing the health data provided by EMR systems and from Sensoria Core embedded microelectronic devices.

We're also seeing well-established solution builders like C.H. Robinson, an American Fortune 500 provider of multimodal transportation services and third-party logistics, are taking advantage of IoT Central. Using Intel intelligent gateways and IoT tags managed by Azure IoT Central, C.H. Robinson has quickly integrated IoT data and insights into its industry-leading Navisphere Vision product. The Navisphere solution is being used by leading retailers including Microsoft’s own supply chain teams to optimize logistics and costs as we prepare to deliver Surface and Xbox products ahead of the holiday season. Jordan Kass, President of TMC, a division of C.H. Robinson responsible for Navisphere described the challenges facing the industry; “Today, Retailers of all sizes need to know where their products are and where they are going … . Building with IoT Central offered us speed, scale, and simplicity to connect devices like Intel’s gateways and IoT tags.”

Vattenfall, a Swedish energy company investing deeply in renewable energy, and Microsoft are collaborating on solutions using Azure IoT Central to address challenges in energy markets to match supply and demand for renewable energy. “The IoT Central app platform has expedited our product development, providing fast and seamless device connectivity and device management, and built-in data storage, rule creation, and dashboarding for our operators,” says, Sebastian Waldenström, Head of Vattenfall’s IoT and Energy Management.

While many of our partners have established industry expertise within verticals, we’ve also seen IoT Central be used by solution builders with horizontal reach, such as Mesh Systems. Mesh Systems is a global expert in asset-tracking solutions, with customer applications spanning retail, logistics, banking, pest control, construction, and much more. “IoT Central helps us do what we do best–only now what used to take 3 months to build now takes 3 days” said Doyle Baxter, strategic alliance manager at Mesh Systems.

New capabilities for production-level solutions

Expanding IoT Central portfolio with IoT Edge: Businesses can now run cloud intelligence directly on IoT devices at the edge managed by Azure IoT Central. This new feature helps businesses connect and manage Azure IoT Edge devices, deploy edge software modules, publish insights, and take actions at-scale–all from within Azure IoT Central.

Seamless device connectivity with IoT Plug and Play: Solution builders building with Azure IoT Central can select from a range of Azure IoT Pre-Certified Plug and Play devices and quickly connect them to the cloud. Customers can now build production grade IoT solutions within days without having to write a single line of device code, drastically cutting down the time to market and costs.

Range of actions within the platform: Azure IoT Central exposes various levels of extensibility from within the platform. A user can define rules on device data streams that trigger no-code (Microsoft Flow) or low-code actions (Azure Logic Apps). A solution builder could also configure more complex actions, exchanging data with an external service via a Webhook or Azure Functions based action.

Extensibility through data export: Continuous Data Export from Azure IoT Central can be used to integrate data streams directly into Azure PaaS services like Azure Blob Storage for data retention, or Azure Event Hub and Azure Service Bus for building rich processing pipelines for IoT data and insights into business applications, or into storage for Azure Machine Learning.

Public APIs to access features: Solution builders with extensibility needs beyond device data now have access to Central features through our public APIs. Users can develop robust IoT solutions that leverage IoT Central programmatically as the core for device modelling, provisioning, lifecycle management, operations (updating and commanding), and data querying.

Application repeatability: Today, solution builders can use application templates to export their investments and duplicate them for new customers, saving hours of time on configuration and customization.

Manageability and scale through multitenancy: We know that many solution builders need more than just repeatability; they also need manageability to truly scale their investments to customers. Which is why in the coming months, Azure IoT Central will support multitenancy; solution builders can build once and use a multitenancy interface to on-board, configure, and update many customers and organizations globally across regions, offering both device and data sovereignty without sacrificing manageability.

User access control through custom user roles: Organizational complexity varies across customer solution implementations. Custom user roles allow for clearly defined access control to the data as well as actions and configurations within the system. It gives users control over exactly what they need and nothing more.

Device and data scale: Azure IoT Central scales users' data processing pipelines and provides storage to support millions of devices. Solution builders can achieve device scale by seamlessly connecting devices with IoT Plug and Play integration and authoring IoT Central experiences for Plug and Play devices.

Pricing update: In early 2020, we're unveiling a new pricing tier that will make scaling solutions more affordable and will provide more flexibility for solution builders. IoT Central customers will soon be able to select between multiple pricing plans based on their specific message volume needs for their projects. Check back on our pricing page in the coming weeks for more details.

Azure IoT Central: your IoT application platform

Microsoft is investing $5 billion in Azure IoT over the next four years. Our goal is to simplify the journey in IoT, allowing solution builders to bring solutions to market faster, while staying focused on digital transformation.

Azure IoT Central offers a powerful example of how Microsoft continues to deliver on this commitment. By removing the complexity and overhead of setup, management burden, and operational costs, we can accelerate the creation of innovative solutions across all industries. Azure IoT Central provides organizations with the IoT application platform they need to create the next wave of innovation in IoT. And that means a more intelligent and connected world that empowers people and organizations to achieve more.

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Digital distribution centers—The future is here

The pace of change has never been as fast as it is now. Globally, the population is becoming more urban and income levels are rising. By 2050, nearly 70 percent of the global population will live in cities or urban areas—that’s six billion people. Consumer behavior has also materially changed over the last decade, and omnichannel retail, personalization, and demand for same day deliveries are growing. To cater to the changing landscape, urban distribution centers that stage products closer to users within large cities are on the rise to enable faster delivery and greater customization.

Within the four walls of the distribution center, picking and packing tasks account for more than 50 percent of the total labor cost of warehousing operations. Access to labor has become increasingly challenging, particularly in urban centers, and staffing levels shoot up five to ten-times normal levels during the holiday season. Space constraints and difficulty in staffing are pushing companies to look at adopting distribution center technologies that cut labor costs, optimizes the flow of products, and improves productivity and utilization of these centers.

Since announcing Microsoft’s $5B commitment to developing an industry leading internet of things (IoT) platform last year, we’ve continued to work with our ecosystem partners to build solutions to address such problems. In “Our IoT Vision and Roadmap” session at Microsoft Build, we announced a partnership with Lenovo and NVIDIA, to bring advanced artificial intelligence (AI) to Azure IoT Edge. The demonstrated solution showed Lenovo hardware, a single SE350 Edge Server, running the Azure IoT Edge runtime with NVIDIA DeepStream to process multiple channels of 1080P/30FPS H265 video streams in real-time, transforming cameras into smart sensors that understand their physical environments and use vision algorithms to find missing products on a shelf or detect damaged goods. Such applications of Azure IoT Edge technology enable customers to quickly and cost effectively deploy retail solutions that optimize their logistics operations.

Today, we are excited to announce the next milestone on this journey, the preview of the Lenovo’s Digital Distribution Center (DDC) solution. Lenovo’s DDC is an IoT solution developed in collaboration with NVIDIA and Microsoft. Through real-time scalable package detection, tracking, and validation, DDC delivers for better optimization and increased utilization of distribution centers for retail, manufacturing, and logistics operations. The solution uses multi-video stream analytics with artificial intelligence and machine learning inferencing to self-learn, optimize, and scale. Additional releases will include geofencing alerts, palletization, depalletization, and last-mile sorting.

DDC is built with Azure IoT Central, Microsoft’s fully managed IoT app platform that makes it easy to connect, monitor, and manage your IoT devices and products. Azure IoT Central simplifies the initial setup of your IoT solution and reduces the management burden, operational costs, and overhead of a typical IoT project. This allows solution builders to apply their energy and unique domain expertise to solving customer needs and creating business value, rather than needing to tackle the operating, managing, securing, and scaling of a global IoT solution. Partners like Lenovo and NVIDIA add unique value through schemas that are relevant to industry solutions like DDC, including common industry hierarchies that organize people, places, and environments.

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Announcing Mobility service for Azure Maps, SDKs updates, and more

Mobility has become the center of an array of new technologies running the gamut from cloud-based algorithms and ride-sharing services, to edge cognition, assisted driving, and traffic pattern analysis – all in an effort to move people and things from one location to another more efficiently. These are challenging initiatives that require scale, real-time intelligence, and deep insights. In an effort to begin chipping away at helping to get people moving, Azure Maps is excited to introduce Mobility service APIs for Azure Maps.

The Mobility service will begin by powering public transit routing, enabling organizations to add public transportation information and routing capabilities into their mobility, IoT, logistics, asset tracking, smart cities, and similar solutions.

The Mobility service APIs for Azure Maps are brought to life in partnership with Moovit, Inc – a partnership that was announced last year. Natively through Azure Maps applications organizations can use transit routing to serve public transportation data to their customers, as well as to generate deeper insights, with applications spanning smart cities, transportation, automotive, field services, retail, and more.

A collection of operations allow applications to request public transit, bikeshare, scooter share, and car share information to plan their routes leveraging alternative modes of transportation and real-time data. Applications can use the information returned for smart city and IoT scenarios like:

◈ Minimizing urban congestion by combining public and private transportation services

◈ Leveraging IoT sensor data to enable dynamic routing

◈ Simulating the movements of occupants in city environment

The Mobility service also provides additional insights on mobility trends, such as public transit ridership, costs and benefits of different transit modes, justifications for additional public transit, or additional taxation opportunities for roads and parking.

The Mobility service provides the ability to natively request nearby transit objects such as public transit stops, shared bikes, scooters, or cars around a given location and allows users to search for specific object types within a given radius returning a set of transit objects with object details. The returned information can be used for further processing such as requesting real-time arrivals for the stop, or transit stop details such as main transit type of most lines stopping for a given public stop, active service alerts, or main transport agency. Users can request transit line details covering basic information, such as line number and group information, or more detailed information such as line geometry, list of stops, scheduled and real-time transit arrivals, and service alerts.

Show on map nearby transit objects around given location and within specific radius. 

Customers can also find out how many available shared bikes are left in the closest dock by requesting docking stations information. While searching for available car share vehicles, details such as future availability and current fuel level are included in the response. This information can be used for further processing, such as calling the Azure Maps Route Range API to calculate a reachable range (isochrone) from the origin point based on fuel or time budget and requesting point of interests within the provided isochrone by using the Search Inside Geometry API.

The Mobility service supports trip planning, returning the best possible route options and providing a variety of travel modes, including walking, biking, and public transit available within the metro area (city). The service allows users to request one or multiple public transit types, such as bus, tram, and subway. It also allows users to focus on certain types of bikes and preferences for a specific transit agency operating in the metro area. Also, users have the option to choose optimal routes based on multiple parameters, such as minimal walking, minimal transfers, or specify desired departure or arrival times. The Mobility service support real-time trip planning and provides real-time arrival information for stops and lines. Azure Maps can send notifications to users about service alerts for stops, lines, and metro areas (city), and provide updated times with alternate routes in case of interruptions.

The Mobility service can also return multiple, alternate routes that may not be considered optimal given current condition, but could be preferred by the end user. The service returns data pertaining various legs comprising the route itinerary, including the locations, public transit lines, as well as start and end times. Users can also request transit itinerary details with additional information such geometry of the route and detailed itinerary schedules.

SDK updates

Azure Maps Web SDK

In this release we have added a preview of a new drawing tools module which makes it easy to draw points, lines, and polygons on the map using a mouse or touch. Several new spatial math features have been added around speed and acceleration-based calculations, as well as affine transformations, polygon area calculations, closest point to a line, and convex hulls. The team has also spent a lot of time adding performance enhancement, stability, and improving accessibility.

Azure Maps Android SDK update

Added support for Azure Active Directory authentication, drawing lines and polygons, and raising and handling events.

Spatial Operations for Azure Maps are now generally available

Azure Maps Spatial Operations takes location information then analyzes it on the fly to help inform customers of ongoing events happening in time and space, enabling near real-time analysis and predictive modeling of events. Spatial Operations provides applications enhanced location intelligence with a library of common geospatial mathematical calculations, including services such as closest point, great circle distance, and buffers.

Cartography and styling updates

Light grey map style

We’ve added a new map style, light grey, to our map style offering. A compliment to the dark grey style, the new light grey canvas is created for our customers to visualize their custom data atop lighter contrast map. Like the other styles, this can be used seamlessly with the Azure Maps Web SDK and Android SDK, for example, to create interactive maps with data driven styling, or heatmaps from a data set of point features.

Zoom level 4

Zoom level 15

Pedestrian and walking paths

Additional detail has been added for pedestrian and walking paths, including moving to zoom level 14, which has greatly improved the appearance of urban areas and city parks.

Road network layering

To give a more realistic view, we are now showing the layering of tunnels, bridges, underpasses, and overpasses for both vehicle and pedestrian crossings.

Data rendering

To improve styling and usability, certain polygons and labels were pushed up in the data so that they appear at higher levels. Hundreds of cities have been regrouped by size in the data in order to adjust which zoom level cities are showed based on significance. As a result, medium and large cities have been moved to zoom level 4. Due to symbol collision, most medium cities do not show until level 5. In addition, all national, regional, and state parks are now rendered at zoom level 4 instead of zoom level 7.

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