IoT Platform-as-a-Service provider PTC has announced that Microsoft is now its preferred cloud partner for industrial deployments, and has made its ThingWorx PaaS available on the Azure cloud. It follows a VR/AR partnership with Microsoft last year, and a win with BMW last week, but comes in a year likely to play host to a lot of IoT PaaS consolidation. The BMW deal was a big win for PTC, a company at the forefront of the IoT PaaS market, which collectively provides the platforms on which a company can build their IoT applications – covering the entire data flow, from network-edge device to cloud-based data service. But the IoT PaaS market as a whole has some tough times ahead of…