Tag: Azure IoT

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Bentley Systems expands alliance with Microsoft to accelerate infrastructure digital twin innovations

Companies will deliver and scale advancements for urban planning and smart cities

REDMOND, Wash., and EXTON, Penn. — Oct. 19, 2020 — Bentley Systems (Nasdaq: BSY) and Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) on Monday announced an expansion of a strategic alliance focused on advancing infrastructure for smart city urban planning and smart construction. The alliance will combine Microsoft’s Azure IoT Digital Twins and Azure Maps with Bentley Systems’ iTwins platform, enabling engineers, architects, constructors and city planners to work within a comprehensive city-scale digital twin, empowering better decision-making, optimizing operational efficiency, reducing costs and improving collaboration.

Bentley logoMicrosoft and Bentley Systems, a leader in engineering software for professionals to design, build, operate and maintain critical infrastructure such as road and rail networks, and public works and utilities, will collaborate to develop new smart city solutions. The companies will explore opportunities for digital twins in urban planning and citizen engagement for cities around the world. The collaboration will enable improved decision-making and increased productivity through Microsoft Teams for infrastructure engineers.

“At Bentley we believe that infrastructure digital twins can empower engineers, constructors and owner-operators to design, build and operate infrastructure assets that are more cost-effective, more resilient and more sustainable,” said Greg Bentley, CEO, Bentley Systems. “With Azure as the foundation of our cloud services, our offerings are more broadly scaled and differentiated by the further integrations of Microsoft technologies. We are excited to extend our partnership to bring new digital twin advances to infrastructure engineering organizations and their constituents.”

“With Azure IoT, Azure Digital Twins and Bentley’s iTwins platform, the world’s infrastructure — vital to our economies and environment — stands to gain so much by enabling people to create comprehensive digital models of an entire environment,” said Casey McGee, vice president, Global ISV Sales, Microsoft. “Our expanded strategic alliance with Bentley Systems opens up new opportunities for innovation and will accelerate the benefits of digital twins for infrastructure engineering organizations and, more broadly, society at large.”

City planning and managing professional football club complex projects

The capital city of Dublin, Ireland, with a population of more than 1.2 million, is working with Bentley Systems to develop a large-scale digital twin as part of the city’s planning efforts. “To overcome the challenges of getting public review and comment for new development projects in Dublin during the pandemic, we turned to Microsoft and Bentley to create an interactive virtual environment to ensure our citizens could provide their input from the safety of their homes and keep the development projects on track,” said Jamie Cudden, smart city program manager at Dublin City Council. “The impact of the pandemic has forced cities like Dublin to accelerate their digital transformation journeys. Working with Microsoft and Bentley we are reimagining how interactive virtual environments and digital twins can support citizens to engage from the safety of their own home on new development projects in their local communities. Working with these technology partners, we are building an adaptable and scalable solution based on Microsoft Teams and Bentley’s OpenCities Planner that will set the standard for the future of planning and public engagement in cities.”

In addition to sustaining infrastructure development in smart cities, project digital twins are facilitating industrial construction. Bentley Systems was recognized by Microsoft as the 2020 MSUS Partner Award winner for the Industry-Automotive category, in which an automotive  factory uses the HoloLens 2 with Bentley’s SYNCHRO 4D construction-modeling software.

Similarly, FC Barcelona, one of the oldest football clubs in Europe, is partnering with Bentley as part of the club’s renovation of Barcelona’s Camp Nou stadium, the largest in Europe, currently under construction amid the pandemic. The project will upgrade streets in the neighborhood and increase capacity at the stadium to revitalize an aging stadium and for the club to compete with other top European cities.

“Bentley has been working with FC Barcelona on the Espai Barça Project for over three years, helping the architects, the construction team and the club complete an extraordinary challenge — delivering a major renovation of the stadium while it continues to host matches,” said William T. Mannarelli, director of Real Estate & Espai Barça. “With Bentley’s SYNCHRO 4D construction-modeling software running on the Azure cloud, we can apply cutting-edge techniques to manage the complex and precise scheduling required to keep the stadium open during construction.”

Bentley’s ProjectWise, in conjunction with Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Teams, has empowered Bentley’s users to work from home safely while collaborating virtually on projects anywhere in the world.

The companies will further combine Bentley’s infrastructure digital twins expertise with Microsoft’s cloud technologies for:

  • ProjectWise 365, an instant-on, 100% Azure cloud-based solution that increases the speed and quality of infrastructure design collaboration, which will be available through Microsoft’s commercial marketplace.
  • Bentley’s iTwins platform to leverage Microsoft’s Azure Digital Twins, Azure IoT Hub, Azure Time Series Insights and other Microsoft cloud services, for users to rapidly store and process operational data.

On Oct. 20, at Bentley’s Year in Infrastructure Conference, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella will join Greg Bentley for a discussion of the companies’ new infrastructure digital twin alliance priorities. Register at Year in Infrastructure 2020.

About Bentley Systems

Bentley Systems (Nasdaq: BSY) is the infrastructure engineering software company. We provide innovative software to advance the world’s infrastructure – sustaining both the global economy and environment. Our industry-leading software solutions are used by professionals, and organizations of every size, for the design, construction, and operations of roads and bridges, rail and transit, water and wastewater, public works and utilities, buildings and campuses, and industrial facilities. Our offerings include MicroStation-based applications for modeling and simulation, ProjectWise for project delivery, AssetWise for asset and network performance, and the iTwin platform for infrastructure digital twins. Bentley Systems employs more than 4,000 colleagues and generates annual revenues of more than $700 million, in 172 countries. www.bentley.com

About Microsoft

Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

For more information, press only:

Microsoft Media Relations, WE Communications for Microsoft, (425) 638-7777, [email protected]

Christine Byrne, (203) 805-0432, [email protected]

Note to editors: For more information, news and perspectives from Microsoft, please visit the Microsoft News Center at http://news.microsoft.com. Web links, telephone numbers and titles were correct at time of publication, but may have changed. For additional assistance, journalists and analysts may contact Microsoft’s Rapid Response Team or other appropriate contacts listed at https://news.microsoft.com/microsoft-public-relations-contacts.

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CVP Sam George: How Azure IoT enables business resilience

Businesses around the world have been harnessing the Internet of Things (IoT) to reduce operational expenses, power breakthrough customer experiences, and create new revenue streams. Now, faced with the unprecedented challenges of our times, businesses are also harnessing IoT to create safer workplaces as employees return to work, reduce expenses to weather downturns, reduce environmental impact and help with sustainability goals, and remain competitive as IoT becomes a standard way of operating a business.

Microsoft is a recognized leader in IoT. Our mission is to simplify IoT and make it available to every organization on the planet, regardless of size or technical capability. And we haven’t stopped there; we simplified IoT with no code and low code offerings like Azure IoT Central that customers and partners can use without any cloud solutions development skills.

At Microsoft, we deeply understand the value of embracing tech intensity, of using data and AI to address challenges and identify opportunities. Azure IoT plays a leading role in this transformation with an edge and cloud methodology that instills confidence in organizations’ ability to act on the insights presented to them.

Azure IoT is uniquely positioned as a fully open, flexible platform that spans industry applications and simplifies the development process. This week at Microsoft Ignite, we shared the latest from Azure IoT and how partners and customers are using these innovations in amazing ways.

RXR Realty builds on Azure IoT to increase safety

When faced with the question of what is needed to enable a safer, sustainable return to the workplace, New York-based RXR Realty looked at how they could quickly pivot the work they were doing around smart buildings to support a holistic end-to-end approach that spans an employee’s entire day—from waking up, to entering the office building and having a productive day, to going home. The result was the RxWell program, a connected environment solution built on Azure IoT, which was developed and deployed in under six months through partnership with Microsoft, McKinsey, and Infosys.

RXR Realty knew that for every one office worker that returns to the office, it drives five service jobs, such as food service and childcare providers, therefore helping stimulate the local economy. Azure technology allowed them to quickly build an edge-to-cloud solution that merges physical and digital assets, giving office workers the tools and peace of mind to navigate the workplace in safety. This technology helps manage employee rotations and enable touch-free building and elevator access.

Additionally, real-time analytics deliver insights into occupant density, air quality, humidity, and population health, enabling businesses and their workers to make informed decisions and navigate office buildings safely and confidently. Read the RXR Realty customer story and watch the Microsoft Mechanics—How We Built It video featuring RXR Realty to get a demo-rich, technical breakdown of the RxWell solution.

GE Aviation digitally models and observes aircrafts with Azure Digital Twins

As connected solutions continue to grow, companies are looking for ways to create richer models of entire connected business environments. Companies are currently able to use Azure Digital Twins to design and build sophisticated digital replicas of assets, environments, and business systems that can be used across connected environments including, smart buildings, utilities, factories, farms, railways, and entire cities.

Many of our customers and partners are already benefiting from Azure Digital Twins. Using Azure Digital Twins, GE Aviation can model digital representations of individual aircrafts and their components to track asset performance, monitor component usage, and view maintenance history. In a world where it’s not always possible to send someone on site, these insights allow GE Aviation to observe the plane inside and out and mitigate issues before they occur—helping get essential supplies and goods to our doors.

“Azure Digital Twins allows us to fuse vital data—whether it’s from our Asset Records system, our EMS system or another—into the asset-centric point of view needed for the new Asset Lifecycle product we’re creating to show an asset’s state at any point in time. Azure Digital Twins also provides an out-of-the-box ability to track changes for properties or relationships between components over time for advanced analytics. This proves valuable for supporting airlines in making critical maintenance decisions, such as whether or not to keep parts on the wing longer, while also helping reduce their maintenance burden, costs, and the amount of downtime or out-of-service-time for an aircraft.”—Nate Hicks, Sr. Product Manager at GE Aviation’s Digital Group

Azure Digital Twins, currently in preview with general availability coming soon, will bring many new capabilities plus the scale, reliability, and broader market availability necessary for customers to build production-ready solutions. Partners can use its flexible integration capabilities to bring together any service and data points from edge devices, as well as any business system—even from outside Azure. Its use of an open modeling language, Digital Twins Definition Language (DTDL), allows companies to create custom models of any connected environment while maintaining compatibility with other parts of the Azure ecosystem.

ENGIE helps decarbonize energy production with Azure Time Series Insights

The emergence of connected environments also means the continued generation of large volumes of data as assets are connected and brought together. To truly see the benefits, companies require comprehensive analytics across large-scale IoT data sets. ENGIE Digital, a European provider of renewable energy, integrated Azure Time Series insights with Azure IoT Edge to deliver a robust data and AI-driven analytics platform across hundreds of renewable energy sites. This enabled them to support historical data analysis and keep pace with large volumes of data while generating contextualized insights, Azure Time Series Insights ensures they always have the latest data at hand.

Azure Time Series Insights Gen2 is a powerful, fully managed IoT analytics platform created to help contextualize and turn IoT data into actionable insights. Features made generally available in July included multi-layered, scalable storage options for both highly interactive analytics over a short time span and advanced analysis of decades worth of historical data. Rich semantic modeling also enables the analysis of billions of events across millions of IoT sensors to identify trends and anomalies, conduct root-cause analysis, and deliver insights for operational excellence.

AT&T builds cellular-enabled guardian module with Azure Sphere

Security continues to be a key investment area for Microsoft as it is imperative that every IoT device is secured by design.  Accordingly, we are very pleased to share the news from Microsoft Ignite that AT&T and Microsoft are teaming up to enable enterprises to seamlessly connect machines and equipment to the cloud with highly secure global network connectivity. The new, cellular-enabled guardian module shows how Microsoft is empowering customers to achieve more, and in turn, to deliver innovation and opportunity to their customers. Check out the full announcement blog post to see opportunities created.

In addition to all the great customer and partner announcements, we announced the following product innovations:

Azure IoT Hub on-premises in Azure Stack Hub

While customers and partners love the power and productivity Azure IoT Hub brings in the cloud, they also asked for support on-premises. We are bringing Azure IoT Hub on-premises in Azure Stack Hub. This is another industry first from Azure IoT and enables customers to take advantage of Azure IoT Hub in occasionally connected or fully disconnected environments, such as manufacturing shop floors, remote industrial sites, and more. We are putting the finishing touches on preview, which will be available in October.

Azure Defender for IoT with CyberX capabilities

IoT security is fundamental and needs to be addressed throughout the ecosystem as organizations’ assets, data, brand, and overall reputation are on the line. Building on this security momentum and research that shows 97 percent of companies highlight security as a concern when adopting IoT, we are expanding upon our existing industry-leading IoT security offerings.

First, we rebranded Azure Security Center for IoT to Azure Defender for IoT. Already generally available, this offering integrates seamlessly with Azure IoT Hub to proactively monitor IoT and IoT Edge devices and cloud solutions and provide security recommendations and alerts.

Next, we are bringing the availability of Azure Defender for IoT CyberX capabilities, which incorporates agentless technology from our recent acquisition of CyberX and offers new capabilities for securing unmanaged brownfield devices used in operational technology environments. The combination of on-device, agent-based monitoring with the new agentless CyberX capabilities makes Azure Defender for IoT one of the most fully featured and sophisticated security offerings in the industry.

And finally, we continue to partner with industry to refine the IoT Security Maturity Model (SMM) in the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC). This establishes a consistent approach for matching security investments with need, addressing areas including governance, processes, technologies, and operations—for which Microsoft co-authored and edited the Practitioner’s Guide.

New Azure IoT Central capabilities

Azure IoT Central is our IoT application platform that builds on top of the Azure IoT platform. It’s an easy, cost-effective way to build, manage, and operate IoT solutions. Go from idea, to proof of concept (PoC), to enterprise scale in weeks with one of the most advanced IoT application platform in the industry.

At Microsoft Ignite, we announced a set of important new Azure IoT Central capabilities including:

  • New Azure IoT Central application template for video analytics—Use this new application template to quickly and easily develop and scale AI-powered video analytics solutions through Intel AI Modules. Leverage existing IP cameras with Azure Media Services and Azure Storage to store and stream relevant portions of the live video feed and live video analytics.
  • Continuous data export—Send filtered and enriched data from your devices in near real-time to cloud destinations unlocking business insights with IoT data. The new data export capability allows you to re-use destinations, send only specific streams of data, and enrich your data with data from your Azure IoT Central application.
  • Use Jobs to interact with devices—The Jobs experience in Azure IoT Central has been redesigned with a new wizard that allows you to create, run, and save jobs. The UI includes rich charts and interactions for monitoring the progress and completion of jobs across a fleet of devices. Next month, we’ll be releasing additional capabilities that include job schedules and batches.
  • Command-line interface (CLI) improvements—The Azure IoT Central CLI extension has a new set of commands including az iot central user, az iot central api-token, and az iot central device compute-device-key for generating device SAS keys used during provisioning.
  • Raw data views—Use the new raw data view to inspect telemetry in real-time as it flows from your devices.
  • File upload—Azure IoT Central now supports uploading media and other files directly from connected devices.

New Azure IoT Edge capabilities

Azure IoT Edge is a leading edge compute offering in the industry, offering unparalleled production readiness and security. At Microsoft Ignite, we announced a set of breakthrough new capabilities including:

  • Nested Azure IoT Edge preview support enables customers to deploy Azure IoT Edge nodes across networks organized in hierarchical layers, such as ISA-95 network topologies, adhering to strict networking requirements to ensure a secure environment from real-time production all the way to the cloud.
  • Azure IoT Edge security with enclaves are now generally available, enabling deployment and execution of Trusted Applications in devices suitably equipped with trusted execution environments.
  • Edge Compute Node protection profile for IoT device security certification combines industry standard definitions and practices to enable how IoT stakeholders create and consume device security claims.
  • Industry-leading monitoring with the latest release of Azure IoT Edge enables rich monitoring of Azure IoT Edge fleets and applications at scale by emitting a rich set of metrics from IoT Edge system modules. Our new monitoring support easily integrates with existing monitoring solutions and even enables local monitoring for offline use cases.

Unified Azure Certified Device program and final certification for IoT Plug and Play

A unified Azure Certified Device program expands on previous Microsoft certification offerings that validate IoT devices meet specific capability needs and work great on Azure. This program helps device builders increase visibility of their products while making it easy for solution builders and customers to find the right device for their IoT solutions via the Azure Certified Device Catalog.

Certifications currently available include: Azure Certified Device, IoT Plug and Play, and Edge Managed. The Final IoT Plug and Play certification, announced in August, helps reduce time to market for device builders. Additionally, Azure IoT platform services and SDKs for IoT Plug and Play will be generally available by the end of this month.

View our developer documentation for more information, and join the companies already beginning to prepare and certify their devices for IoT Plug and Play.  Also, read the full technical blog to learn more about these certifications and others in development.

Accelerate technical skills with Azure IoT Developer Specialty certification and new learning content

Part of empowering tech intensity in our customers and partners is providing the tools and resources for individuals to successfully use advanced digital technologies, such as machine learning and IoT, so they can see projects through to realization. The Azure IoT Developer Specialty certification is a great first step to support developers in gaining technical knowledge, advancing their career, and becoming recognized as experts on their journey to building innovative new solutions.

Developers looking to start their IoT learning and certification journey can find free online courses at Microsoft Learn. They can also prepare for certification with the new Internet of Things Event Learning Path on GitHub. This series of five video-based modules explores topics including IoT device connectivity, IoT data communication strategies, use of AI at the edge, data processing considerations for IoT data, and IoT solutioning based on the Azure IoT reference architecture.

We encourage you to explore these new releases and innovations in depth, and learn more about how Azure IoT can help with  business resilience and staying agile for the future of connected ecosystems. We also recommend checking out these

Microsoft Ignite sessions:

Additional IoT learning resources:

Azure. Invent with purpose.

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Azure IoT Connector for FHIR for health teams now in preview

Today, Microsoft released the preview of Azure IoT Connector for FHIR—a fully managed feature of the Azure API for FHIR. The connector empowers health teams with the technology for a scalable end-to-end pipeline to ingest, transform, and manage Protected Health Information (PHI) data from devices using the security of FHIR® APIs.

Telehealth and remote monitoring. It’s long been talked about in the delivery of healthcare, and while some areas of health have created targeted use cases in the last few years, the availability of scalable telehealth platforms that can span multiple devices and schemas has been a barrier. Yet in a matter of months, COVID-19 has accelerated the discussion. We have an urgent need for care teams to find secure and scalable ways to deliver remote monitoring platforms and to extend their services to patients in the home environment.

Unlike other services that can use generic video services and data transfer in virtual settings, telehealth visits and remote monitoring in healthcare require data pipelines that can securely manage Protected Health Information (PHI). To be truly effective, they must also be designed for interoperability with existing health software like electronic medical record platforms. When it comes to remote monitoring scenarios, privacy, security, and trusted data exchanges are must-haves. Microsoft is actively investing in FHIR-based health technology like the Azure IoT Connector for FHIR to ensure health customers have an ecosystem they trust.

FHIR to fuel the Internet of Medical Things

FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) is now the interoperability standard for secure and private exchange of health data. FHIR began as an open source framework for clinical data, but it’s growing adoption makes it an ideal technology to bring together data from the growing “Internet of Medical Things” (IoMT) and expand healthcare in remote monitoring scenarios.

Today remote data capture often requires device-specific platforms, making it difficult to scale when new processes are added or if patients use multiple devices. Developers have to build their own secure pipelines from scratch. With the Azure IoT Connector for FHIR available as a feature on Microsoft’s cloud-based FHIR service, it’s now quick and easy for health developers to set up an ingestion pipeline, designed for security to manage PHI from IoT devices. The Azure IoT Connector for FHIR focuses on biometric data at the ingestion layer, which means it can connect at the device-to-cloud or cloud-to-cloud workstreams. Health data can be sent to Event Hub, Azure IoT Hub, or Azure IoT Central, and is converted to FHIR resources, which enables care teams to view patient data captured from IoT devices in context with clinical records in FHIR.

The key features of the Azure IoT Connector for FHIR include:

  • Conversion of biometric data (such as blood glucose, heart rate, or pulse ox) from connected devices into FHIR resources.
  • Scalability and real-time data processing.
  • Seamless integration with Azure IoT solutions and Azure Stream Analytics.
  • Role-based Access Control (RBAC) allows for managing access to device data at scale in Azure API for FHIR.
  • Audit log tracking for data flow.
  • Helps with compliance in the cloud: ISO 27001:2013 certified, supports HIPAA and GDPR, and built on the HITRUST certified Azure platform.

Ingest IoMT data from devices using Azure IoT Connector for FHIR.

Microsoft customers are already ushering in the next generation of healthcare

As the delivery of healthcare shifts outside the exam room, new FHIR-enabled technology is fueling IoT scenarios across the ecosystem of Microsoft’s customers.
Here are few of the great solutions already underway:

Humana’s Conviva Care Centers transform care for chronic conditions with IoT and FHIR

Conviva Care Centers, Humana’s senior-focused primary care subsidiary, will be using the Azure IoT Connector for FHIR this fall as Humana accelerates remote monitoring programs for patients living with chronic conditions. Congestive heart failure patients who monitor their weight and blood pressure at home will be able to use a new platform that enables easy sharing of data with their care team. Data from in-home devices, like scales and blood pressure cuffs, can be transferred via Azure IoT Connector for FHIR, providing doctors and nurses real-time data managed in a highly secure and private pipeline and allowing for proactive virtual touchpoints. Humana’s flexible remote monitoring platform will not only ensure patients have the support they need between clinic visits, but will also accelerate the future of user-centric care.

“Using the Azure IoT Connector for FHIR will open up new remote care paths for patients living with chronic conditions. Being able to make decisions with data coming in real time from home devices will be the game changer for improving the quality and timeliness of patient care.” —Marc Willard, Senior Vice President of Digital Health and Analytics at Humana

Sensoria Health’s Motus Smart—powered by Sensoria—is the new gold standard for enabling diabetes rehabilitation with remote monitoring

Motus Smart, powered by Sensoria, is a cutting-edge device used to provide remote patient monitoring quantified patient adherence and activity data to manage patients with diabetic foot ulcers and reduce amputation risk. Sensoria was able to deploy the Azure IoT Connector for FHIR to enable highly secure data exchange from the Motus device to patients, their doctors, and others within their circle of care. Clinicians at the Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center are using enterprise-class applications to see real-time data, proactively reach out to patients, and address any issues that might be impeding proper treatment.

Centene connected health data platform helps manage chronic diseases

Centene is using Azure IoT Connector for FHIR in an effort to better manage the ever-expanding personal bio-metric data resulting from the proliferation of wearables and other medical devices. The company is leveraging the connector to explore the use of near-real-time monitoring and alerting as part of its overall priority on improving the health of its members, enabling them to take better care of themselves, and supporting its care management staff with actionable insights to improve the health of the communities Centene serves. In the future, Centene intends to use the connector to monitor and manage chronic conditions such as congestive heart failure, diabetes, and high-blood pressure. By leveraging Microsoft’s scalable, open platforms, Centene can make further progress toward improving outcomes for Centene Health Plan members.

Learn more and get started

We’re excited about the way our customers are embracing and delivering transformative care with FHIR technology. As we bring down the barriers of interoperability with new FHIR-based tools, the future vision of how we can evolve healthcare starts to unfold and it’s inspiring.

Microsoft has expanded the tools in our FHIR ecosystem to include IoT pipelines, so our customers have easy to use, interconnected tools for responsibly managing patient health data. Whether you’re building clinical applications, analytics engines, or developing artificial intelligence (AI) with telehealth and remote monitoring, we want to make sure you have pipelines for PHI data with security in mind. Check out the Azure IoT Connector for FHIR and the Azure API for FHIR to get started today!

Read more about the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, which brings together our integrated capabilities, like our FHIR tools, with robust cloud capabilities specific to customers and partners in the healthcare industry. The Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare enriches patient engagement and connects health teams to help improve collaboration, decision-making, and operational efficiencies.

FHIR® is the registered trademark of HL7 and is used with the permission of HL7.

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Samsung and Microsoft transform real estate and smart property management

New pilot collaboration offers single, integrated portal for managing devices and smart appliances in buildings

SEOUL, South Korea and REDMOND, Wash. — July 13, 2020 — Samsung Electronics Co. and Microsoft Corp. today announced a global collaboration focused on digitally transforming the real estate development and property management industries. This collaboration, combining smart appliances and digital cloud technologies, aims at helping to drive improved building operations and maintenance, along with creating better experiences for both service technicians and residents.

This new strategic alliance, with pilots currently under development, brings together the power of Microsoft’s Azure IoT platform and productivity cloud services with Samsung’s smart devices and SmartThings platform, to help optimize building operations, equipment maintenance, energy management, asset performance, and new tenant experiences for commercial, hospitality and residential buildings as well as mixed-use developments.

The companies will leverage Samsung’s smart home appliances, HVAC systems and smart TVs integrated with SmartThings, together with Microsoft’s Azure Digital Twins technology and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service, to improve building maintenance and management by aggregating and analyzing IoT data from building systems and connected appliances. For example, with this new capability building managers can not only create an integrated dashboard for handling building issues in real time but potentially before failure, saving time and resources.

Microsoft’s Azure IoT platform is able to process data messaging from millions of building sensors and devices and then use machine learning and AI to help building managers and operators determine what issues should be addressed in what order, and then link to Dynamics 365 Field Service to determine who is the right person, with the right skills, in the right location to resolve the issue. This helps to reduce service calls while also improving the productivity of service technicians who can now troubleshoot multiple issues on a single visit and, if needed, get remote assistance through the Microsoft Teams application.

This collaboration with Samsung extends this capability to include Samsung smart appliances, HVAC systems and TVs, with plans to expand into digital signage equipment. The alliance also covers Samsung mobile devices, including the XCover Pro mobile phone, to create improved experiences for frontline workers involved in handling building issues. Additionally, Samsung plans to offer SmartThings mobile development tools to enable builders to craft custom, tailored connected living experiences for their end users.

The collaboration will leverage data from Samsung’s range of smart refrigerators, washing machines, vacuums, air purifiers, ovens and other devices connected through the intelligent SmartThings platform. Such data integration allows building operators to monitor nearly all devices in real time, identify issues and take appropriate measures before real damage happens, should a problem occur.

“We believe collaboration with a key partner like Microsoft is essential for innovation, as the company shares our vision of inspiring the world to shape the future by innovating in technology and products,” said Chanwoo Park, corporate vice president heading up the IoT Biz Group at Samsung. “Providing building owners and operators with a robust and powerful set of tools to help them optimize their building costs and equipment, including the management of Samsung’s connected appliances and other devices, is paramount to our long-term alliance. Together with Microsoft, we are helping to solve real challenges faced by our customers by creating secure integrated insight and digital solutions that keep properties functioning sustainably and efficiently while providing better experiences for residents.”

“With Azure Digital Twins, we can create comprehensive digital models of entire environments and a living digital replica of real-world things, places, business processes and people to help customers gain insights that drive better products, optimization of operations, cost reduction and breakthrough customer experiences. This collaboration with Samsung opens up new opportunities for further innovation in the real estate development and property management industries,” said Sam George, corporate vice president, Azure IoT, Microsoft. “Together, we’ll bring the best of Microsoft’s trusted, easy-to-use and secure Azure IoT platform, Azure Digital Twins and Dynamics 365 Field Service technology with Samsung’s expertise in connected devices and appliances to streamline building operations and maintenance.”

In addition to bringing new capabilities to the real estate and property management world, the companies have aligned their worldwide marketing, partner and sales programs to deliver these new integrated solutions for their customers, including facilities management companies and real estate developers.

Oxford Properties, one of the largest real estate companies in North America, also with operations in Europe and Australia, says this new alliance has the potential to add high value for customers.

“We are excited about the collaboration of Microsoft’s Digital Twins technology and Samsung’s range of connected devices, and the potential of these instruments to deliver meaningful new insights across the commercial real estate value-chain,” said Dean Hopkins, chief operating officer, Oxford Properties. “Investing in digital twins sets a foundation to unlock future opportunities. We are working with thought leaders around the world to advance the intelligence of our buildings and see enormous potential to positively impact building operations, asset management and customer experiences. Microsoft and Samsung coming together to accelerate the value that digital twins are bringing to the commercial real estate ecosystem is a great step forward.”

The National University of Singapore (NUS) will serve as a pilot for solutions pioneered under this alliance between Samsung and Microsoft as part of the university’s ongoing efforts to create a smart, safe and sustainable campus for students and staff.

“NUS is very excited to work with Microsoft and Samsung in piloting smart building management solutions on our campus,” said Professor Yong Kwet Yew, senior vice president of Campus Infrastructure at NUS. “The experience gained from this trial could help us transform the way we maintain our buildings with predictive maintenance, enable better user experiences and create a smart campus ecosystem, and it has potential to scale up at the national level.”

About Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.

Samsung inspires the world and shapes the future with transformative ideas and technologies. The company is redefining the worlds of TVs, smartphones, wearable devices, tablets, digital appliances, network systems, and memory, system LSI, foundry and LED solutions. For the latest news, please visit the Samsung Newsroom at http://news.samsung.com.

About Microsoft

Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

For more information, press only:

Microsoft Media Relations, WE Communications for Microsoft, (425) 638-7777, [email protected]

Note to editors: For more information, news and perspectives from Microsoft, please visit the Microsoft News Center at http://news.microsoft.com. Web links, telephone numbers and titles were correct at time of publication, but may have changed. For additional assistance, journalists and analysts may contact Microsoft’s Rapid Response Team or other appropriate contacts listed at https://news.microsoft.com/microsoft-public-relations-contacts.

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How companies are making buildings smarter with Azure IoT

Commercial real estate developers, building owners, facilities management companies, and tenants have a huge opportunity to address, and solve for, the unique business challenges faced by their industry, by applying the Internet of Things (IoT) to buildings. For example, by leveraging data from IoT sensors and building management systems, companies can gain insights that enable them to save energy, reduce operational expenses, increase occupant comfort, and optimize space.

However, the COVID-19 crisis has presented a new set of challenges for developers, owners, and management companies. New forecasts show the smart building market size growing between 7.3 percent and 11.6 percent annually to overall market revenues of between $65.2 billion and $82.7 billion USD in 2025.1

View from an internal balcony inside a high-rise, smart building using Azure IoT looking down on a light-filled lobby filled with tables, chairs, and plants.

Smart buildings also help companies meet regulations for tracking and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Let’s look at how Bosch Building Technologies, Bentley Systems, Schneider Electric, and ICONICS use Azure IoT to deliver the benefits of smart buildings.

Decreasing energy requirements

The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy estimates that implementing smart building technology in an existing building can result in energy savings of 30–50 percent.2 For example, companies can combine data from occupancy sensors with data from HVAC and lighting systems to lower room temperatures and turn lights off in unoccupied rooms.

Bosch Building Technologies developed an in-house Energy Platform to analyze energy consumption and pursue ongoing energy efficiency. Based on Microsoft Azure, the Energy Platform monitors and analyzes energy consumption in real-time. Bosch customers use the Energy Platform to connect to IoT enabled devices and then link to existing meters, sensors, and machines. Customers can make informed decisions to improve energy and resource efficiency.

Bosch offers the solution to customers and uses it internally at more than 100 manufacturing plants worldwide. At one of their larger plants, Bosch saves up to €1.2 million (approximately $1.3 million USD) a year.

Bosch also created a Building Intelligence as a Service program to provide new IoT-based services for customers. Bosch adopted Azure Digital Twins as part of their Connected Building Services offering. By leveraging Azure Digital Twins, the company can query data from entire rooms or spaces, rather than from disparate sensors, to build complete digital models of the physical building environment.

By using Azure Digital Twins, Bosch gains more precise data for a wide range of building technology systems. With this level of precision, it’s easier for customers to fully understand data points, consumption results, context, and how they relate to the physical environment to quickly gain insights on energy usage to inform their business decisions.

Librarian checks her smartphone while standing outside an elevator near a balcony overlooking a floor below that shows a desk and books.

Human factor design of new buildings can help decrease energy requirements.

Creating a connected workplace

At Microsoft’s Frasers Tower in Singapore, Bentley Systems and Schneider Electric implemented sensors and telemetry to create a connected workplace. They used a mix of 179 Bluetooth beacons in meeting rooms and 900 sensors for lighting, air quality, and temperature. The platform generates nearly 2,100 data points that are stored and analyzed in Azure. Using the data, Microsoft optimizes various aspects of the spaces, making them more comfortable for employees, while reducing energy consumption in a sustainable and economical manner.

Additionally, Bentley Systems built a digital twin of the Fraser Towers on its Bentley iTwin platform—using Azure Digital Twins, Azure IoT Hub, and Azure Time Series Insights. The iTwin platform uses both historical and real-time data from IoT sensors to create an exact digital replica of the physical building. The building management team uses the information to dynamically allocate space, increase utilization, reduce costs, improve competitiveness, and enhance collaboration and productivity.

Maintenance worker on a ladder in conference room changing an Azure IoT sensor in a lighting fixture.

Sensors generate data that is stored and analyzed to decrease energy use.

Monitoring occupancy and reducing costs

ICONICS smart building software has run on Microsoft Azure since 2015. The software is an integration hub for building management systems that control heating, ventilation, and lighting and collect and centralize each system’s sensor data. ICONICS relies on Azure Digital Twins to boost solution scalability and rapidly deliver innovative capabilities to customers, such as viewing space occupancy and spatial analytics.

Microsoft uses the ICONICS smart building software to collect sensor data in office buildings in the Puget Sound area of Washington State. The ICONICS solution aggregates the data over multiple buildings to give facility managers visibility into building health and applies big data analytics to provide insights that drive decisions in order to deliver energy savings. In fact, the Microsoft Energy Smart Buildings program, leveraging ICONICS software, has saved Microsoft 20 percent off its energy bills.

Next steps

Smart buildings provide insights that enable real estate developers, commercial building owners, facilities managers, and tenants to save energy, reduce operational expenses, increase occupant comfort, and meet regulatory and sustainability goals.

To learn more about best practices for planning smart building projects, download the white paper, Smart buildings: From design to reality, co-written by Microsoft and L&T Technology Services.

Also visit, Azure IoT to find the right IoT approach for your solutions.

1Impact of COVID-19 on the Global IoT in Smart Commercial Buildings Market to 2025 – ResearchAndMarkets.com.

2 Smart Buildings: Using Smart Technology to Save Energy in Existing Buildings.

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Microsoft acquires CyberX to accelerate and secure customers’ IoT deployments

The Internet of Things (IoT) is providing breakthrough value to businesses across every vertical, from manufacturing, to energy, to agriculture, to real estate, to healthcare and more.  IoT provides real-time insights into assets, enabling businesses to reduce operational expenses, unplanned downtime and unnecessary servicing.

While the benefits of IoT are well established and significant, one of the biggest hurdles for customers is securing IoT devices  – both for new digitization initiatives as well as for legacy Operational Technology and industrial control system environments. Two years ago, Microsoft announced a $5 billion investment in IoT to further our commitment to  build a trusted, easy-to-use platform for our customers and partners to build connected solutions – no matter where they are starting in their IoT journey.

Microsoft already provides multi-layer IoT security and IoT security monitoring in Azure, which is being used by thousands of customers in production and has made securely configuring IoT devices possible.  And while securely configuring IoT devices is possible, our mission is to simplify IoT and make securing IoT devices easy.

Yet there are still challenges customers have that we seek to solve:

  1. Giving customers visibility into what IoT devices are already connected to their networks.
  2. Managing the security on existing IoT devices (referred to as “brownfield devices”) that have been historically difficult due to a myriad of custom protocols.

Today we are excited to share that Microsoft is acquiring CyberX to help solve these challenges. CyberX will complement the existing Azure IoT security capabilities, and extends to existing devices including those used in industrial IoT, Operational Technology and infrastructure scenarios. With CyberX, customers can discover their existing IoT assets, and both manage and improve the security posture of those devices. With CyberX, customers can see a digital map of thousands of devices across a factory floor or within a building and gather information about their asset profile and vulnerabilities. Gaining this visibility is not only critical for understanding where security risks may exist and then mitigating those risks, but it is also a fundamental step to securely enable smart manufacturing, smart grid and other digitization use cases across production facilities and the supply chain.

And while Microsoft is adding CyberX to our security capabilities, our partnerships with the broad set of security providers in the ecosystem is more important than ever, with many of them providing on-the-ground expertise and integration services.

We will continue to deliver more value to our customers as CyberX is further integrated with Microsoft’s broad portfolio of IoT security offerings in threat protection that span users, endpoints, applications, data and more.  For example, in conjunction with Azure Sentinel, Microsoft’s cloud-native, next-generation security information and event management (SIEM)/security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) with built-in IoT security workload, SecOps personnel will be able to identify threats that span Operational Technology- and IT-converged networks that were previously challenging to detect.

We know that customers need help improving the security of their existing IoT environment. CyberX’s technology and team will be an incredible addition to Microsoft in our commitment to both IoT security and innovation as you work to digitally transform your business. For more information about CyberX, you can view the CyberX listing in the Azure Marketplace, check out their website, or request a demo here.

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IoT Plug and Play is now available in preview

Today we are announcing that IoT Plug and Play is now available in preview! At Microsoft Build in May 2019, we announced IoT Plug and Play and described how it will work seamlessly with IoT Central. We demonstrated how IoT Plug and Play simplifies device integration by enabling solution developers to connect and interact with IoT devices using device capability models defined with the Digital Twin definition language. We also announced a set of partners who have launched devices and solutions that are IoT Plug and Play enabled. You can find their IoT Plug and Play certified devices at the Azure Certified for IoT device catalog.

With today’s announcement, solution developers can start using Azure IoT Central or Azure IoT Hub to build solutions that integrate seamlessly with IoT devices enabled with IoT Plug and Play. We have also launched a new Azure Certified for IoT portal, for device partners interested to streamline the device certification submission process and get devices into the Azure IoT device catalog quickly.

This article outlines how solution developers can use IoT Plug and Play devices in their IoT solutions, and how device partners can build and certify their products to be listed in the catalog.

Faster device integration for solution developers

Azure IoT Central is a fully managed IoT Software as a Service (SaaS) offering 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 cuts the management burden, operational costs, and overhead of a typical IoT project. Azure IoT Central integration with IoT Plug and Play takes this one step further by allowing solution developers to integrate devices without writing any embedded code. IoT solution developers can choose devices from a large set of IoT Plug and Play certified devices to quickly build and customize their IoT solutions end-to-end. Solution developers can start with a certified device from the device catalog and customize the experience for the device, such as editing display names or units. Solution developers can also add dashboards for solution operators to visualize the data; as part of this new release, developers have a broader set of visualizations to choose from. There is also the option to auto generate dashboards and visualizations to get up and running quickly. Once the dashboard and visualizations are created, solution developers can run simulations based on real models from the device catalog. Developers can also integrate with the commands and properties exposed by IoT Plug and Play capability models to enable operators to effectively manage their device fleets. IoT Central will automatically load the capability model of any certified device, enabling a true Plug and Play experience!

Another option available for developers who’d like more customization is to build IoT solutions with Azure IoT Hub and IoT Plug and Play devices. With today’s release, Azure IoT Hub now supports RESTful digital twin APIs that expose the capabilities of IoT Plug and Play device capability models and interfaces. Developers can set properties to configure settings like alarm thresholds, send commands for operations such as resetting a device, route telemetry, and query which devices support a specific interface. The most convenient way is to use the Azure IoT SDK for Node.js (other languages are coming soon). And all devices enabled for IoT Plug and Play in the Azure Certified for IoT device catalog will work with IoT Hub just like they work with IoT Central.

An image of the certified device browsing page.

Streamlined certification process for device partners

The Azure Certified for IoT device catalog allows customers to quickly find the right Azure IoT certified device to quickly start building IoT solutions. To help our device partners certify their products as IoT Plug and Play compatible, we have revamped and streamlined the Azure Certified for IoT program by launching a new portal and submission process. With the Azure Certified for IoT portal, device partners can define new products to be listed in the Azure Certified for IoT device catalog and specify product details such as physical dimensions, description, and geo availability. Device partners can manage their IoT Plug and Play models in their company model repository, which limits access to only their own employees and select partners, as well as the public model repository. The portal also allows device partners to certify their products by submitting to an automated validation process that verifies correct implementation of the Digital Twin definition language and required interfaces implementation.

An image of the device page for the MXChip-Certified.

Device partners will also benefit from investments in developer tooling to support IoT Plug and Play. The Azure IoT Device Workbench extension for VS Code adds IntelliSense for easy authoring of IoT Play and Play device models. It also enables code generation to create C device code that implements the IoT Plug and Play model and provides the logic to connect to IoT Central, without customers having to worry about provisioning or integration with IoT Device SDKs.

The new tooling capabilities also integrates with the model repository service for seamless publishing of device models. In addition to the Azure IoT Device Workbench, device developers can use tools like the Azure IoT explorer and the Azure IoT extension for Azure Command-line Interface. Device code can be developed with the Azure IoT SDK for C and for Node.js.

An image of the Azure IoT explorer.

Connect sensors on Windows and Linux gateways to Azure

If you are using a Windows or Linux gateway device and you have sensors that are already connected to the gateway, then you can make these sensors available to Azure by simply editing a JSON configuration. We call this technology the IoT Plug and Play bridge. The bridge allows sensors on Windows and Linux to just work with Azure by bridging these sensors from the IoT gateway to IoT Central or IoT Hub. On the IoT gateway device, the sensor bridge leverages OS APIs and OS plug and play capabilities to connect to downstream sensors and uses the IoT Plug and Play APIs to communicate with IoT Central and IoT Hub on Azure. A solution builder can easily select from sensors enumerated on the IoT device and register them in IoT Central or IoT Hub. Once available in Azure, the sensors can be remotely accessed and managed. We have native support for Modbus and a simple serial protocol for managing and obtaining sensor data from MCUs or embedded devices and we are continuing to add native support for other protocols like MQTT. On Windows, we also support cameras, and general device health monitoring for any device the OS can recognize (such as USB peripherals). You can extend the bridge with your own adapters to talk to other types of devices (such as I2C/SPI), and we are working on adding support for more sensors and protocols (such as HID).

Next steps

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Azure IoT at Build: making IoT solutions easier to develop, more powerful to use

Ran Tech / Microsoft 3/9/17

IoT is transforming every business on the planet, and that transformation is accelerating. Companies are harnessing billions of IoT devices to help them find valuable insights into critical parts of their business that were previously not connected—how customers are using their products, when to service assets before they break down, how to reduce energy consumption, how to optimize operations, and thousands of other user cases limited only by companies’ imagination.

Microsoft is leading in IoT because we’re passionate about simplifying IoT so any company can benefit from it quickly and securely.

Last year we announced a $5 billion commitment, and this year we highlighted the momentum we are seeing in the industry. This week, at our premier developer conference, Microsoft Build in Seattle, we’re thrilled to share our latest innovations that further simplify IoT and dramatically accelerate time to value for customers and partners.

Accelerating IoT

Developing a cloud-based IoT solution with Azure IoT has never been faster or more secure, yet we’re always looking for ways to make it easier. From working with customers and partners, we’ve seen an opportunity to accelerate on the device side.

Part of the challenge we see is the tight coupling between the software written on devices and the software that has to match it in the cloud. To illustrate this, it’s worth looking at a similar problem from the past and how it was solved.

Early versions of Windows faced a challenge in supporting a broad set of connected devices like keyboards and mice. Each device came with its own software, which had to be installed on Windows for the device to function. The software on the device and the software that had to be installed on Windows had a tight coupling, and this tight coupling made the development process slow and fragile for device makers.

Windows solved this with Plug and Play, which at its core was a capability model that devices could declare and present to Windows when they were connected. This capability model made it possible for thousands of different devices to connect to Windows and be used without any software having to be installed on Windows.

IoT Plug and Play

Late last week, we announced IoT Plug and Play, which is based on an open modeling language that allows IoT devices to declare their capabilities. That declaration, called a device capability model, is presented when IoT devices connect to cloud solutions like Azure IoT Central and partner solutions, which can then automatically understand the device and start interacting with it—all without writing any code.

IoT Plug and Play also enables our hardware partners to build IoT Plug and Play compatible devices, which can then be certified with our Azure Certified for IoT program and used by customers and partners right away. This approach works with devices running any operating system, be it Linux, Android, Azure Sphere OS, Windows IoT, RTOSs, and more. And all of our IoT Plug and Play support is open source as always.

Finally, Visual Studio Code will support modeling an IoT Plug and Play device capability model as well as generating IoT device software based on that model, which dramatically accelerates IoT device software development.

We’ll be demonstrating IoT Plug and Play at Build, and it will be available in preview this summer. To design IoT Plug and Play, we’ve worked with a large set of launch partners to ensure their hardware is certified ready:

Build_IoT_replace

Certified-ready devices are now published in the Azure IoT Device Catalog for the Preview, and while Azure IoT Central and Azure IoT Hub will be the first services integrated with IoT Plug and Play, we will add support for Azure Digital Twins and other solutions in the months to come. Watch this video to learn more about IoT Plug and Play.

Announcing IoT Plug and Play connectivity partners

With increased options for low-power networking, the role of cellular technologies in IoT projects is on the rise. Today we’re introducing IoT Plug and Play connectivity partners. Deep integration between these partners’ technologies and Azure IoT simplifies customer deployments and adds new capabilities.

This week at Build, we are highlighting the first of these integrations, which leverages Trust Onboard from Twilio. The integration uses security features built into the SIM to automatically authenticate and connect to Azure, providing a secure means of uniquely identifying IoT devices that work with current manufacturing processes.

These are some of the many connectivity partners we are working with:

Build_IoT_2

Making Azure IoT Central more powerful for developers

Last year we announced the general availability of Azure IoT Central, which enables customers and partners to provision an IoT application in 15 seconds, customize it in hours, and go to production the same day—all without writing code in the cloud.

While many customers build their IoT solutions directly on our Azure IoT platform services, we’re seeing an upswell in customers and partners that like the rapid application development Azure IoT Central provides. And, of course, Azure IoT Central is built on the same great Azure IoT platform services.

Today at Build, we’re announcing a set of new features that speak to how we’re enabling and simplifying Azure IoT Central for developers. We’ll show some of these innovations, such as new personalization features that make it easy for customers and partners to modify Azure IoT Central’s UI to conform with their own look and feel. In the Build keynote, we’ll show how Starbucks is using this personalization feature for their Azure IoT Central solution connected to Azure Sphere devices in their stores.

We’ll also demonstrate Azure IoT Central working with IoT Plug and Play to show how fast and easy this makes it to build an end-to-end IoT solution, with Microsoft still wearing the pager and keeping everything up and running so customers and partners can focus on the benefits IoT provides. Watch this video to learn more about Azure IoT Central announcements.

The growing Azure Sphere hardware ecosystem

Azure Sphere is Microsoft’s comprehensive solution for easily creating secured MCU-powered IoT devices. Azure Sphere is an integrated system that includes MCUs with built-in Microsoft security technology, an OS based on a custom Linux kernel, and a cloud-based security service. Azure Sphere delivers secured communications between device and cloud, device authentication and attestation, and ongoing OS and security updates. Azure Sphere provides robust defense-in-depth device security to limit the reach and impact of remote attacks and to renew device health through security updates.

At Build this week, we’ll showcase a new set of solutions such as hardware modules that speed up time to market for device makers, development kits that help organizations prototype quickly, and our new guardian modules.

Guardian modules are a new class of device built on Azure Sphere that protect brownfield equipment, mitigating risks and unlocking the benefits of IoT. They attach physically to brownfield equipment with no equipment redesign required, processing data and controlling devices without ever exposing vital operational equipment to the network. Through guardian modules, Azure Sphere secures brownfield devices, protects operational equipment from disabling attacks, simplifies device retrofit projects, and boosts equipment efficiency through over-the-air updates and IoT connectivity.

The seven modules and devkits on display at Build are:

  • Avnet Guardian Module. Unlocks brownfield IoT by bringing Azure Sphere’s security to equipment previously deemed too critical to be connected. Available soon.
  • Avnet MT3620 Starter Kit. Azure Sphere prototyping and development platform. Connectors allow easy expandability options with a range of MikroE Click and Grove modules. Available May 2019.
  • Avnet Wi-Fi Module. Azure Sphere-based module designed for easy final product assembly. Simplifies quality assurance with stamp hole (castellated) pin design. Available June 2019.
  • AI-Link WF-M620-RSC1 Wi-Fi Module. Designed for cost-sensitive applications. Simplifies quality assurance with stamp hole (castellated) pin design. Available now.
  • SEEED MT3620 Development Board. Designed for comprehensive prototyping. Available expansion shields enable Ethernet connectivity and support for Grove modules. Available now.
  • SEEED MT3620 Mini Development Board. Designed for size-constrained prototypes. Built on the AI-Link module for a quick path from prototype to commercialization. Available May 2019.
  • USI Dual Band Wi-Fi + Bluetooth Combo Module. Supports BLE and Bluetooth 5 Mesh. Can also work as an NFC tag (for non-contact Bluetooth pairing and device provisioning). Available soon.

For those who want to learn more about the modules, you can find specs for each and links to more information on our Azure Sphere hardware ecosystem page.

See Azure Sphere in action at Build

Azure Sphere is also taking center stage at Build during Satya Nadella’s keynote this week. Microsoft customer and fellow Seattle-area company Starbucks will showcase how it is testing Azure IoT capabilities and guardian modules built on Azure Sphere within select equipment to enable partners and employees to better engage with customers, manage energy consumption and waste reduction, ensure beverage consistency, and facilitate predictive maintenance. The company’s solution will also be on display in the Starbucks Technology booth.

Announcing new Azure IoT Edge innovations

Today, we are announcing the public preview of Azure IoT Edge support for Kubernetes. This enables customers and partners to deploy an Azure IoT Edge workload to a Kubernetes cluster on premises. We’re seeing Azure IoT Edge workloads being used in business-critical systems at the edge. With this new integration, customers can use the feature-rich and resilient infrastructure layer that Kubernetes provides to run their Azure IoT Edge workloads, which are managed centrally and securely from Azure IoT Hub. Watch this video to learn more.

Additional IoT Edge announcements include:

  • Preview of Azure IoT Edge support for Linux ARM64 (expected to be available in June 2019).
  • General availability of IoT Edge extended offline support.
  • General availability of IoT Edge support for Windows 10 IoT Enterprise x64.
  • New provisioning capabilities using x.509 and SaS token.
  • New built-in troubleshooting tooling.

A common use case for IoT Edge is transforming cameras into smart sensors to understand the physical world and enable a digital feedback loop: finding a missing product on a shelf, detecting damaged goods, etc. These examples require demanding computer vision algorithms to deliver consistent and reliable results, large-scale streaming capabilities, and specialized hardware for faster processing to provide real-time insights to businesses. At Build, we’re partnering with Lenovo and NVIDIA to simplify the development and deployment of these applications at scale. With NVIDIA DeepStream SDK for general-purpose streaming analytics, a single IoT Edge server running Lenovo hardware can process up to 70 channels of 1080P/30FPS H265 video streams to offer a cost-effective and faster time-to-market solution.

This summer, NVIDIA DeepStream SDK will be available from the IoT Edge marketplace. In addition, Lenovo’s new ThinkServer SE350 and GPU-powered “tiny” edge gateways will be certified for IoT Edge.

Announcing Mobility Services through Azure Maps

Today, an increasing number of apps built on Azure are designed to take advantage of location information in some way.

Last November, we announced a new platform partnership for Azure Maps with the world’s number-one transit service provider, Moovit. What we’re achieving through this partnership is similar to what we’ve built today with TomTom. At Build this week, we’re announcing Azure Maps Mobility Services, which will be a set of APIs that leverage Moovit’s APIs for building modern mobility solutions.

Through these new services, we’re able to integrate public transit, bike shares, scooter shares, and more to deliver transit route recommendations that allow customers to plan their routes leveraging the alternative modes of transportation, in order to optimize for travel time and minimize traffic congestion. Customers will also be able to access real-time intelligence on bike and scooter docking stations and car-share-vehicle availability, including present and expected availability and real-time transit stop arrivals.

Customers can use Azure Maps for IoT applications—or any application that uses geospatial or location data, such as apps for field service, logistics, manufacturing, and smart cities. Retail apps may integrate mobility intelligence to help customers access their stores or plan future store locations that optimize for transit accessibility. Field services apps may guide employees from one customer to another based on real-time service demand. City planners may use mobility intelligence to analyze the movement of occupants to plan their own mobility services, visualize new developments, and prioritize locations in the interests of occupants.

You can stay up to date about how Azure Maps is paving the way for the next generation of location services on the Azure Maps blog, and if you’re at Build this week, be sure to visit the Azure Maps booth to see our mobility and spatial operations services in action.

Simplifying development of robotic systems with Windows 10 IoT

Microsoft and Open Robotics have worked together to make the Robot Operating System (ROS) generally available for Windows 10 IoT. Additionally, we’re making it even easier to build ROS solutions in Visual Studio Code with upcoming support for Windows, debugging, and visualization to a community-supported Visual Studio Code extension. Read more about integration between Windows 10 IoT and ROS.

Come see us at Build

If you’re in Seattle this week, you can see some of these new technologies in our booth, and even play around with them at our IoT Hands-on Lab. I’ll also be hosting a session on our IoT Vision and Roadmap. Stop by to hear more details about these announcements and see some of these exciting new technologies in action.

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Azure IoT Edge: secure, portable, open – and now available on virtual machines

Earlier this year, Microsoft announced the general availability of Azure IoT Edge which enables customers to bring cloud intelligence to the edge and act immediately on real-time data, whether it be a drone recognizing a crack in a gas pipe or predicting equipment failure before it happens. Azure IoT Edge is built to be secure, portable, and open. The Azure IoT Edge runtime is open sourced on GitHub so you can easily modify code, and the open container approach allows you to deploy Microsoft and 3rd party services across a range of edge devices.

We’re committed to building an open, robust ecosystem and giving customers choices in deploying their edge solution. Today we’re announcing that Azure IoT Edge runs in a virtual machine (VM) using one of these supported operating systems. While this works for multiple virtualization technologies, VMware has simplified the deployment process of Azure IoT Edge to VMs using VMware vSphere. Additionally, vSphere 6.7 and later provide passthrough support for Trusted Platform Module (TPM), allowing Azure IoT Edge to maintain its industry leading security framework by leveraging the hardware root of trust.

Azure’s intelligent edge portfolio is designed to run on a breath of hardware to match our customers’ scenarios. This includes everything from microcontroller units (MCUs) running Azure Sphere to a fully consistent experience that is both cloud and edge, powered by Azure Stack. Azure IoT Edge already supports a variety of Linux and Windows operating systems as well as a spectrum of hardware from devices smaller than a Raspberry Pi to servers. Supporting IoT Edge in VMware vSphere offers even more customer choice for those who want to run AI on infrastructure they already own.

The hardware portfolio available to customers to power scenarios at the intelligent edge is almost as diverse as the sectors it’s being used in. We see customers building hybrid cloud and edge solutions in virtually every industry, and the hardware they choose for each is fit for purpose:

  • Home appliance makers can use Azure Sphere certified chips in their appliances to ensure operation is never compromised and customer data stays secure.

  • The oil and gas industry is optimizing production and performing predictive maintenance by processing rod pump data on site with Azure IoT Edge devices, smaller than a Raspberry Pi.

  • Utilities companies are autonomously inspecting pipelines and powerlines for defects through video analytics running on drones with Azure IoT Edge.

  • Textile producers are detecting weaving defects by adding industrialized PCs running Azure IoT Edge to their production lines.

  • Large retailers are optimizing their stores’ energy usage by analyzing HVAC data with Azure IoT Edge in a VM, running on existing servers in each retail store.

  • Electronic makers are implementing quality control and audit compliance scenarios with Azure Data Box Edge.

  • Healthcare networks are using Azure Stack to optimize stocking vaccines while complying with industry regulations around personally identifiable medical data.

Every company’s digital transformation is unique. Some scenarios can be accomplished primarily in the cloud, while a number of use cases require high value cloud services to be free from data centers and run adjacent to, or actually on, the devices creating data. Azure provides the most secure, scalable, and flexible options, regardless your company’s hybrid cloud and edge needs.

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Message in a bottle: IoT bringing real-time manufacturing insights

The next time you’re shopping at a duty-free store, whether for an expensive whiskey or high-end cosmetics, chances are high that you’d pick up a bottle that was born in one of Piramal Glass’s manufacturing facilities with the help of an army of IoT sensors and advanced data analytics in the cloud.

With four manufacturing facilities spread across India, Sri Lanka, and the US, Piramal Glass is one of the world’s largest designers and producers of glass packaging for the pharmaceuticals, cosmetics and perfumery, and speciality food and beverage industries. The company counts 17 of the world’s top 20 cosmetics, perfumery, and skin care brands like LVMH, Coty, Sisley and Yves Rocher, as its customers. In fact, one in every three nail polish bottles in the world is manufactured by them.

But for one man being at the pinnacle of the industry wasn’t enough.

“Glass manufacturing is a complex industry with fixed costs and capacities that are therefore very sensitive to variations in demand. It was imperative to optimize the operations to drive profitable growth and it was evident that Industry 4.0 was one of the key levers to achieve this,” says Vijay Shah, Director, Piramal Glass & Executive Director, Piramal Enterprises Ltd.

Going digital

According to the ‘Unlocking the Economic Impact of Digital Transformation in Asia Pacific’ study conducted by Microsoft in partnership with IDC Asia Pacific, while 90% of organizations in India are in the midst of their digital transformation journey, only 7% in the entire region can be classified as Leaders. These are organizations that have full or progressing digital transformation strategies, with at least a third of their revenue derived from digital products and services. Leaders of digital transformation experience double the benefits of Followers, and these improvements will be more pronounced by 2020.

The management at Piramal Glass knew they had to become Leaders of digital transformation and set new benchmarks in the glass manufacturing business if they had to stay ahead of the curve. The writing was on the cloud.

“Digital can mean different things to different people. For us, it is to drive operational efficiency, enhance customer experience, and generate new revenue models by leveraging emerging technologies,” says Poorav Sheth, who joined Piramal Glass in November 2016 as its first Chief Digital Officer.

a man standing in front of a machine
Poorav Sheth, Chief Digital Officer, Piramal Glass

To kickstart the digital transformation of a legacy manufacturing business, Sheth conducted roadshows and workshops across the company’s offices and manufacturing facilities with demonstrations of latest technologies like IoT, augmented reality, and artificial intelligence (AI).

“We wanted to educate everyone–from those involved in production to operations to marketing—what was possible with digital transformation. We conducted envisioning sessions, which lead to people coming up with different concepts that they thought would enhance their functions,” he recalls.

One of the asks that came up frequently was could the manufacturing process get smarter to improve production efficiency and reduce defects? Glass products are produced in a continuous manufacturing process, where the raw materials go into a furnace to create molten glass, which is then formed into a bottle that goes through various treatments and checks before it is packed. It is a tricky process because you can’t pause it in case something goes wrong. In the earlier scenario, if a production batch was witnessing higher rejections at quality control, they could only hope to fix the problem in the next batch.

What made it more difficult was that data points from every batch were captured manually in paper logbooks which were painstaking to analyze. Often, the actions taken were based on the skills and experience of the expert and not so much with data. Could going digital change this?

It was game on for Sheth and his team of seven experts.

Getting real-time manufacturing insights

In July 2017, Sheth’s team started with a proof of concept to implement Real Time Manufacturing Insights (RTMI) in three production lines in one of the facilities based in Kosamba near Surat, a city in the western Indian state of Gujarat. The idea was to put a bunch of sensors on the production lines and see the data they could get and what they could do with the data. For this they decided to work with Microsoft and Precimetrix, a Microsoft partner.

“We were impressed with the platform approach Microsoft has taken with Azure IoT and the industrial automation experience Precimetrix brought to the table. We worked as a team and they also guided us on the kind of sensors and gateway devices we should use,” Sheth explains.

a furnace
A furnace alone has nearly 100 sensors and other data acquisition devices.

Like most things, the task at hand was easier said than done. There were nearly 100 sensors and data acquisition devices that already existed in the furnace alone! Add to it equipment sensors throughout the production line to monitor every aspect of their functioning to specialized camera-based sensors in inspection machines. The team also had the task of installing as many as 4,000 sensors that had to be connected and analyzed through RTMI.

“We are excited to partner with Piramal Glass as they create a strong foundation for driving transformational change. It is significant that our technology enabled the plant operations to continue as usual during the rollout of the Azure IoT solution, ensuring no disruption to the core manufacturing and deep integration with critical business processes,” says Sashi Sreedharan, Managing Director, Microsoft India.

Once the tricky part of installing the sensors and hooking them all to the cloud with Azure IoT Hub, the digital team started collecting every data point they could get from the production line. The sensors sent data every second, offering a microscopic peek into every machine and every process from the time raw material was fed into the furnace to the time the bottles came off the conveyor belts to be packed and shipped.

“We involved everyone from the production teams who were manning the lines, to quality control teams, to figure out the kind of data that’d be most useful to them. They came up with new suggestions frequently, which showed they were invested in the process,” he says.

Within three months the entire data collection process in those three lines was made paperless with dashboards that were accessible on smartphones, laptops and even large displays on the factory floors. A custom solution was developed on top of this platform to provide stage-wise losses, production reports, quality control workflows as well as role-specific KPIs. Actionable alerts were sent through SMS, email, and push notifications, whenever an anomaly was detected, or the production efficiency dropped. The benefits of RTMI were immediate.

Plant managers could now monitor the key performance metrics of the plant without having to wait for the notebook logs at the end of every shift, enabling them to take faster decisions. It also created a real-time feedback loop between the quality control and production teams, where operators managing the shop floor could spot the exact place where defects were emanating from and fix it to reduce rejections.

a group of people standing in front of a display
Employees at the plant can now get real-time insights on big displays on the factory floor, which enables them to take decisions faster.

The project was such a success that the management decided to roll it out across all the 60 manufacturing lines Piramal Glass currently runs in four manufacturing plants spread in three countries. Starting in March this year, Sheth and his team has already implemented it on 46 lines in just six months and hope to complete the remaining before the end of the year. With this, Piramal Glass has created the first of its kind Smart Manufacturing platform with customized dashboards and workflows.

RTMI, which is a customized, first of its kind home grown solution in the glass manufacturing industry, not only offers more insights in real-time than the existing Manufacturing Execution System but also reduces the cost of ownership by 70%. RTMI has led to 40% reduction in manual data gathering, which has resulted in 25% improvement in employee productivity. The real-time feedback loop has led to 5% reduction in defects, which translates into better quality and enhanced predictability of delivery timelines for Piramal Glass’s customers.

“RTMI has democratized information availability and provided actionable insights to our skilled workforce. It has resulted in 1% improvement in production efficiency with a payback period of less than a year,” says Shah.

Bringing AI to glass manufacturing

a glass bottle being manufactured
Hot molten glass is being molded into a bottle.

There are more than 150 variables in the glass manufacturing process and a slight change in any of the variables could impact the product. With the implementation of IoT sensors and RTMI, Piramal Glass is now able to monitor most of these variables in real-time. So far, the company has analyzed more than 200 million data points from the 4,000 sensors.

From adopting disruptive technologies like IoT and AI, to creating a culture of agility and competition, to measuring digital transformation successes with new key performance indicators, Piramal Glass is a Leader in digital transformation in every sense. But this is just the beginning.

“Implementing IoT sensors is not the endgame. They only provide data, it is what you do with that data is the key. We’re now developing a Digital Twin for our production lines where we have implemented AI and Machine Learning models using the Microsoft Cognitive Services platform. This will enable us to predict production efficiency, defect causality and product quality, for every batch, based on input parameters derived from RTMI,” Sheth says.

“Microsoft is committed towards the technological advancement of the manufacturing sector in India and has made considerable investments to help drive digital transformation across optimized operations, innovative products and services, engaged customers and empowered employees,” adds Sreedharan.