Microsoft’s Sam George on Simplifying IoT: Insights from the IoT Solutions World Congress

Last year, Microsoft announced a $5b billion investment on IoT. Microsoft has been busy implementing new features on IoT Central, launching Azure Maps, and getting ready to offer Azure Sphere for general use.

Microsoft recently made several announcements during the IoT Solutions World Congress, including the following new capabilities on IoT Central, its fully managed IoT app platform:

• White labeling, the ability to customize it to the customer’s identity and look.
• API Support, extending IoT Central and integrating it with other solutions.
• IoT Plug and Play, for easy device connectivity.
• Multitenancy Support, to build applications with multiple tenants, each with its own data.
• New, Two-Tier Pricing Model, available early 2020, designed to help customers to have predictable pricing as they scale their IoT applications.

Additionally, Microsoft is announcing new features on Azure Maps, including geospatial weather intelligence in partnership with AccuWeather, and the availability of Azure RTOS to enable Express Logic’s ThreadX to run on billions of existing microcontrollers.

To know more about these and other IoT-related news from Microsoft, we sat down with Sam George, CVP of Azure IoT.

You can watch our interview with Sam George below. A full transcript of the interview follows the clip.

IoT Times: Good afternoon Sam, thank you for your time today.

Last year, Microsoft announced a $5 billion investment on IoT. What can you tell us about how this investment is paying out so far?

Sam George:   Over the last year, we recently announced that with our five billion dollar investment we’d brought over 100 new services and features and innovations to market in only one year. We’ve also significantly increased the amount of product team investment, research and development that we’re doing in IoT. The other thing that we’ve been doing, most importantly, is increasing the velocity of our partner motion, and making it so that Microsoft’s co-sell programs are actually selling our partners solutions. So our sales field actually goes in and works directly with the partner sales fields to sell solutions for IoT. So all of that has been producing a tremendous amount of momentum for us, for IoT.

IoT Times:    On the IoT Solutions World Congress you are announcing new features for IoT Central. What can you tell us about these features?

Sam George:    Well first, for folks that might not be familiar with it, with IoT Central, what we’re doing is we’ve already built out what we feel is one of the most comprehensive and powerful IoT platforms on the planet, with everything from device and edge support up through Azure services for IoT. And then we’re continuing to simplify IoT solution development for both partners and customers directly. And we’re doing that with IoT Central. And so IoT Central is built on all of those hyperscale capable cloud solutions, and yet it introduces a very easy to use IoT application platform that requires no cloud solution development skills at all. So you can provision an IoT Central application in about 15 seconds. You can customize it with no cloud solution development skills in a couple hours, and you can go to production the same day. And that’s quite remarkable from what IoT has been in the past.

The reason why we’re doing this is because we did an IoT Signals research, and what we found is that about 48 percent of all respondents from 3,200 companies worldwide cited a lack of technical skills as a reason that was blocking their IoT adoption. And so we looked at it like we wanted to introduce an offering that didn’t require deep technical skills for IoT. So now at the IoT Solutions World Congress here, we just announced a huge set of new capabilities for IoT Central, including one we call white labeling, which is the ability to customize it and make it look like whatever you want it to, your own offering, your own brand, and have that shine through. We introduced 11 new industry vertically specialized templates. And these are primarily for partners in different industries to have a huge head start in customizing IoT Central for different industries. We introduced IoT Edge Support, so you can take our industry leading Edge offering, which enables you to run cloud services right on IoT devices, and connect and manage that from IoT Central. We’re introducing full API support, so things that you can do in IoT Central, like provisioning devices and finding insights from those and triggering rules and actions, you can do through APIs. We also introduced a new, very simple, two-tier pricing model. So if you have devices that aren’t sending a lot of data, we have an even less expensive SKU of that. And of course IoT Central has a free trial. So for up to two devices, you can use it forever as you’re developing your solution free of charge. So it’s a very comprehensive offering that’s really meant to accelerate not just customers but also all of our partners, that they themselves have trouble hiring talented cloud solution developers.

IoT Times:    Last year you were talking about the IoT Solutions Accelerators. Is that continuing?

Sam George:    Yeah. We absolutely still have those. But what we found is that there’s almost a stratification. There’s a set of customers that are using our platform services directly. And for those, those solution accelerators help them get started assembling those services. But for customers that don’t want to manage the individual cloud service, and they just want to connect devices, have us automatically scale the system, have us take care of high availability and disaster recovery, multi-region support and all of that, then we’re doing a lot of that work in IoT Central.

IoT Times:    Can you tell us a little bit about Azure Maps and the new geospatial capable features?

Sam George:    We have a service, for those that might not be aware, called Azure Maps. And what Azure Maps is, it’s an Azure native service where you can have not only visible maps that run in web browsers and on mobile apps, but also geospatial capable APIs, like for example, if you want to get routing information or find certain things in polygons, or look up addresses by zip codes and things like that, or regions by zip code. What we found is that in an IoT solution, there’s almost always a mapping component, and you’re almost always interested in that IoT device’s location, its motion, where it’s been, where it’s routing to. And what we’ve done, we’ve taken a very interesting approach, we feel, with Azure Maps, and that is to have both, to have an offering that’s comprehensive, and it’s backed by some really incredible mapping providers like TomTom. So, TomTom provides some of the base map mapping and geospatial capabilities, but then we’ve been adding other partners into that, like Moovit for transit information, and then just this week we announced AccuWeather as well.

So for example, and what’s nice about all of those is that those single APIs that I have for Azure Maps, they work across all those different providers. So for example, if I wanted to get a visual map that took into account weather information with routing, and I wanted to avoid certain weather, like if it was snowing in some location, then our map routing will take into account live data that AccuWeather is providing.

IoT Times: Last April, Microsoft acquired Express Logic, makers of ThreadX, which provides intelligence for Microcontrollers. How is this offering integrating with your existing hardware platforms, Azure Sphere, and RTOS?

Sam George:    If you look at the billions and billions of devices that are being connected to clouds, the vast majority of those are microcontrollers. If you look at offerings like our hero security offering in the microcontroller space, which is Azure Sphere, that runs on a microcontroller profile with about four megabytes of memory. There’s many microcontrollers that are much smaller than that that run on 16 or 32 kilobyte of memory, so very small and constrained devices. And so for that, we bought Express Logic. They have a suite of offerings, including ThreadX. And what we’ve done is, we just recently announced in our blog that we were making Azure RTOS available, and we’ve got a partnership with Renesas now, to deliver and to use Azure RTOS, ThreadX now, on all of their devices, and make that available to their partners. So it’s very important to us. It’s also highly complementary with Azure Sphere. So Azure Sphere has actually three cores in its chips. It has a Cortex A7 and two M4 chips. And so Azure RTOS ThreadX will now run directly on those endpoints as well.

IoT Times:    Now we are talking about Azure Sphere. What’s happening on the microcontroller space?

Sam George:    Yeah, absolutely. So with Azure Sphere, we recently announced a partnership, in addition to our media tech and NXP partnerships that we’re very excited about, just announced another partnership with Qualcomm. And Qualcomm is pretty interesting for us, because it brings cellular connectivity to Azure Sphere. We also have a broad set of hardware partners that are putting together hardware kits for Azure Sphere. And then just today, we announced the upcoming general availability of Azure Sphere, which will be available in February 2020, so just a few months from now.

IoT Times:    Can you give us a real world example?

Sam George:    Absolutely, one of the great examples that we’ve been talking about is with Starbucks. Starbucks has these very, of course sophisticated brewers that the baristas operate to make your coffee. And what Starbucks was doing before is, these devices have little network ports, and they were driving around devices that would plug into them and download new recipes. And what they’re doing with Azure Sphere now is, they are taking Azure Sphere with the network connection, plugging it into their brewers, and then directly connecting them to the cloud. And so now instead of rolling trucks to update the brewing machines, they can actually just distribute recipes online throughout all of their stores, and yet have Azure Sphere provide the security boundary capabilities for that device, because those brewers were never designed with internet connectivity in mind. So now they have that. And that’s a great example of where Sphere is being used to retrofit an existing ground field device.

IoT Times: Thank you so much Sam, it is great to see you once again in Barcelona.