Microsoft furthers $5 billion IoT plan with new Azure features

The ballooning internet of things (IoT) segment shows no sign of slowing down. According to IDC, 41.6 billion devices — including smartphones, smart home assistants, and appliances — will be connected to the internet by 2025. And by 2022, the market is anticipated to be worth $24.88 billion, growing with a 19.75% compound annual interest rate. In an effort to capture a larger slice of it, at IoT Solutions World Congress today Microsoft announced new capabilities in Azure to “simplify” customer journeys and deliver “highly secured” IoT solutions. Azure IoT CVP Sam George said in a blog post that these are intended to help drive better business outcomes across its Azure IoT software-as-a-service (SaaS) suite, which is growing nearly 150% year-over-year and gained over 100 new features this past year. Microsoft said last April that it intends to set aside $5 billion in IoT and the intelligent edge over the next four years, a substantial uptick from the $1.5 billion it spent on those initiatives prior to 2018. It’s an investment that’s already been put toward acquisitions like that of real-time operating systems developer Express Logic, and it’s likely to pay dividends. By 2020, Gartner predicts there will be more than 20 billion connected devices, and it’s estimated that 9 billion MCU-powered devices are built and deployed globally every year. “We live in an increasingly connected world,” he said.