Microsoft is funneling significant resources toward its IoT business in hopes of catching up to AWS: It plans to shell out $5 billion on IoT over the next four years. However, Microsoft has fallen behind AWS the latter has a 52% adoption rate while the former has a 31% adoption rate, according to a survey by the Eclipse IoT Working Group. Microsoft's IoT innovations could help the tech giant as it wrestles with Amazon Web Services (AWS) for dominance in the massive IoT platforms market. Microsoft and AWS were early entrants into the global IoT platforms market which Business Insider Intelligence estimates will bring in $18 billion in annual revenue by 2023 with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 40%. Users can access Azure analytics capabilities and deploy cloud applications without compromising latency, bandwidth, or data privacy requirements.
Lastly, Microsoft announced that its Azure IoT Edge software modules will be available within Windows 10 IoT. With Azure IoT Edge for Windows, customers can scale their IoT solutions across the cloud or edge by deploying custom or pre-packaged code through IoT Edge modules.Via ROS, industrial robotics systems can be programmed with AI and intelligent edge capabilities - such as hardware-accelerated Windows machine learning, computer vision, Azure Cognitive Services, and turnkey connection to Azure IoT cloud services. The Linux-based ROS was first announced in October 2018 and is aimed at enterprise clients like manufacturers. The company also announced it is expanding its Robot Operating System (ROS), a set of software libraries and tools that help users build robot applications, to Windows IoT. ROS for Windows will enable developers to more easily build and deploy commercial-grade ROS solutions on the operating system.
This IoT variant of the company’s Windows Server 2019 could be appealing to clients who have adopted or expect to adopt Windows Server 2019, as it relies on the same development and management tools.