After taking the reins from the infamous Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s new (ish) CEO Satya Nadella has been firmly focused on refocusing the company on its software and services specialties – recently writing off the Nokia assets it bought for more than the acquisition price.
In the IoT, Microsoft is consequently positioning itself as a cloud-first player, using the bulk of its Azure software and services, as well as the leverage that its Windows ecosystem provides. With a specialized flavor of Windows 10 that can run on the Raspberry Pi, Microsoft is placing itself at all ends of the IoT value chain – from the garage hobbyist all the way up to those who need to spool up massive cloud compute instances.
This week, alongside launching Windows 10, Microsoft is rolling out support for the AllJoyn software stack in its new OS, as well as partnering with Jasper to help link in-field devices with its Azure IoT Suite cloud platform. In addition, Jasper has finalized a deal with Telefonica in Brazil to boost the latter’s M2M platform.
We’ve heard of Windows 10’s upcoming support for AllJoyn, which effectively (in the best case scenario) gives all Windows 10 devices using a WiFi connection the ability to communicate with the Qualcomm-backed device discovery and control platform – that’s being promoted by the AllSeen Alliance, initially backing Atheros WiFi chips.
This is big news for the smart home, as Windows PCs are still very common among households. While it’s true that annual shipments are down, PCs are multi-year devices, and there’s a strong possibility that a marketing push, leveraging the free upgrade program that is currently being run with Windows 10, could see an increase in smart home adoption in the near future – if Microsoft chooses to push the PC as a smart home controller with the support of the growing AllJoyn device ecosystem.
While that’s something of a long-view, and no such plans have been made public so far, it’s worth considering – especially as Microsoft has shown pretty similar ambitions in the past via its Xbox One console, which was positioned as a home entertainment and media hub at launch, before losing a lot of ground to Sony’s purer gaming focus and lessening the living-room ambitions of the console. Consequently, the Xbox is now focused on video games, but it is another device that is well positioned for growing into a smart home product – via AllJoyn and its WiFi connection.
With Jasper, Microsoft is hoping to take center stage with Jasper customers, which use the M2M platform to connect devices to the cloud. Jasper itself has previously partnered with SAP to integrate the HANA in-memory database technology with its own cloud platform, so that readings pulled from the network-edge can be easily inserted into databases, and then fed to the necessary applications.
Of course, Microsoft is hoping that its Azure IoT platform can provide those applications. The Azure IoT suite includes analytics, remote device management, monitoring and predictive maintenance. With machine learning, Azure should be able to allow business to monetize the data they collect, spotting trends in the data, or simply streamlining business processes and making them more efficient – and thereby improving margins.
With the software-first strategy, Microsoft is hoping to win customers at every level of the value chain, from the cloud servers, to the office/field PCs, and all the way down to devices that use Windows for IoT. While the end-devices is still in the early days of its development cycle, getting a version of Windows to run on the extremely popular development (and hobbyist) platform is a sensible first step.
In addition, Microsoft followed the news about the Pi with the announcement that it would be porting Windows 10 to the Arduino platform. While not exactly running a full OS on the microcomputers, Microsoft has provided two software libraries that will allow an Arduino to access a Windows 10 device.
In that architecture, the Windows 10 device acts as a bridge out to the rest of the internet, with an example implementation being a security camera controlled by the Arduino, with a UI rendered by Windows. The Windows device would also be able to control the camera, via cloud applications, and when you combine the Arduino news with the AllJoyn announcement, you can very clearly spot the beginnings of Windows as a smart home platform.
Speaking to RCR Wireless, Telefonica’s Manager of M2M Business Development said that the deal with Jasper led to the creation of Telefonica’s Vivo M2M Control Center Platform – which is focused on international services. “It will attend global corporate clients that want to build an IoT solution in Brazil, in compliance with our regulations,” he said, adding that the platform allows businesses in any market to deploy services inside Brazil.