Microsoft Shines Light on Partners’ Smart Cities Efforts

Microsoft has recently put several of its partners in the spotlight for their use of Azure’s IoT capabilities for smart cities innovation. The partners were showcased at IoT Solutions World Congress in Barcelona earlier this fall.

One of the partners, View, uses Azure’s Digital Twins spatial-mapping service for its smart building applications. They also use Azure IoT Edge and Azure Sphere as part of their dynamic glass product. This is a special type of glass designed to optimize the amount of sunlight that shines into a building for improved energy efficiency. View uses Azure Digital Twins for its SmartProtect security offering, which monitors for and alerts instantly when building glass is broken.

The IoT Edge Service has been live for 6 months now and provides access to Stream Analytics, Azure Functions, and Machine Learning. It performs via containers that run locally on IoT devices. Azure Sphere is in public preview and is expected to be released later in 2019. It is a microcontroller unit specifically designed for IoT devices.

See also: Privacy a key issue stalling major smart city projects

Moovit, another partner, is Microsoft’s official supplier of public transit routing services to Azure Maps. Developers can tap into the data generated by Maps via APIs and can be used by organizations, end users and smart city management solution creators. Moovit offers urban data analytics, which they call “Mobility as a Service” and an application that delivers public transit info to commuters. It has agreed to add its public transit APIs to Azure’s data center infrastructure. Microsoft, in turn, will integrate that data into various apps and services.

Other partners highlighted include LTI, which uses Azure Maps in its Advanced Operations Center offering for city administrators, LTTS, which uses Azure Digital Twins for campus facility management, and Datahoist, which uses the IoT to gather operational data from elevators.