Category: Microsoft news

Microsoft news, features, events, and press materials

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Latency is the new currency of the Cloud: announcing 31 new Azure edge sites

Providing users fast and reliable access to their cloud services, apps, and content is pivotal to a business’ success.

The latency when accessing cloud-based services can be the inhibitor to cloud adoption or migration. In most cases, this is caused by commercial internet connections that aren’t tailored to today’s global cloud needs. Through deployment and operation of globally and strategically placed edge sites, Microsoft dramatically accelerates the performance and experience when you are accessing apps, content, or services such as Azure and Office 365 on the Microsoft global network.

Edges optimize network performance through local access points to and from the vast Microsoft global network, in many cases providing 10x the acceleration to access and consume cloud-based content and services from Microsoft.

What is the network edge?

Solely providing faster network access isn’t enough, and applications need intelligent services to expedite and simplify how a global audience accesses and experiences their offerings. Edge sites provide application development teams increased visibility and higher availability to access services that improve how they deliver global applications.

Edge sites benefit infrastructure and development teams in multiple key areas

  • Improved optimization for application delivery through Azure Front Door (AFD.) Microsoft recently announced AFD, which allows customers to define, manage, accelerate, and monitor global routing for web traffic with customizations for the best performance and instant global failover for application accessibility.
  • An enhanced customer experience via high-bandwidth access to Azure Blob storage, web applications, and live video-on-demand streams. Azure Content Delivery Network delivers high-bandwidth content by caching objects to the consumer’s closest point of presence.
  • Private connectivity and dedicated performance through Azure ExpressRoute. ExpressRoute provides up to 100 gigabits per second of fully redundant bandwidth directly to the Microsoft global network at select peering locations across the globe, making connecting to and through Azure a seamless and integrated experience for customers.

A diagram of an Azure Edge Site.

New edge sites

Today, we’re announcing the addition of 31 new edge sites, bringing the total to over 150 across more than 50 countries. We’re also adding 14 new meet-me sites to Azure ExpressRoute to further enable and expand access to dedicated private connections between customers’ on-premises environments and Azure.

A map showing upcoming and live edges.

More than two decades of building global network infrastructure have given us a keen awareness of globally distributed edge sites and their critical role in a business’ success.

By utilizing the expanding network of edge sites, Microsoft provides more than 80 percent of global GDP with an experience of sub-30 milliseconds latency. We are adding new edges every week, and our ambition is to provide this level of performance to all of our global audience.

This expansion proves its value further when workloads move to the cloud or when Microsoft cloud services such as Azure, Microsoft 365, and Xbox are used. By operating over a dedicated, premium wide-area-network, our customers avoid transferring customer data over the public internet, which ensures security, optimizes traffic, and increases performance.

New edge sites

Country

City

Colombia

Bogota

Germany

Frankfurt
Munich

India

Hyderabad

Indonesia

Jakarta

Kenya

Nariobi

Netherlands

Amsterdam

New Zealand

Auckland

Nigeria

Lagos

Norway

Stavanger

United Kingdom

London

United States

Boston
Portland

Vietnam

Saigon

Upcoming edge sites

Country

City

Argentina

Buenos Aires

Egypt

Cairo

Germany

Dusseldorf

Israel

Tel Aviv

Italy

Rome

Japan

Tokyo

Norway

Oslo

Switzerland

Geneva

Turkey

Istanbul

United States

Detroit
Jacksonville
Las Vegas
Minneapolis
Nashville
Phoenix
Quincy (WA)
San Diego

Country

City

Canada

Vancouver

Colombia

Bogota

Germany

Berlin
Dusseldorf

Indonesia

Jakarta

Italy

Milan

Mexico

Queretaro (Mexico City)

Norway

Oslo
Stavanger

Switzerland

Geneva
Thailand

Bangkok

United States

Minneapolis
Phoenix
Quincy (WA)

With this latest announcement, Microsoft continues to offer cloud customers the fastest and most accessible global network, driving a competitive advantage for organizations accessing the global market and increased satisfaction for consumers.

Explore the Microsoft global network to learn about how it can benefit your organization today.

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Fighting fire with AI: Unlocking the value of data in Seoul

Hongik University’s Professor Lee and his students used AI to develop a new model that can predict the probability of fires.

Nothing is more associated with death and destruction than fire. It can produce a primal fear in all of us.

So, when a university professor in Seoul, South Korea, challenged his class to use data to find solutions for complicated real-world problems, one student suggested analyzing information held by the city’s Fire Department.

The idea was to predict the probability of fires so that authorities could take action to make the city safer for its more than 9 million residents.

Hongik University’s Professor Jae Seung Lee and his students used artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) algorithms to develop a new model that can now do just that.

With Azure Machine Learning Studio, they ran different ML modules until they were able to predict fires with a 90% accuracy rate.

Maximizing readiness

The information they extracted from the datasets identified parts of the city with a high probability of fire – knowledge that has empowered firefighters to optimize their patrol routes and deployments.

Having more fire crews on duty in more “flammable” neighborhoods means they can respond to calls faster and so secure the safety of people and minimize property damage.

The analysis also looked at the locations of fire stations and spotted gaps or blank areas that were not adequately covered. Because Seoul is already a very developed city, you can’t just build a new station. Instead, authorities deployed more fire crews to stations on the fringes of underserved areas.

Professor Lee admits being surprised by some of the findings of the project.

“I used to think older districts, like Gangbuk, were more prone to fires. But the model revealed otherwise,” he said. “Newer districts, like Gangnam, are actually more susceptible to fire incidents, as there are more shops and people around the neighborhood. Illegal parking also plays a role.”

City authorities have welcomed such unexpected insights.

Jeong Joon Ahn, Director of Big Data Division at Seoul metropolitan Government said, “The project is a good example of what we want to achieve. We want to use the latest technology, like artificial intelligence, to make our city safer while using our resources more efficiently.”

The new AI model predicts that newer districts like Gangnam are more susceptible to fire incidents.

Building trust

The department had “a lot of data” about the causes of fires, their locations, as well as the casualty numbers, but they wanted to make sure the data would be shared in a way that protected citizens’ privacy.

To do that, Professor Lee suggested building a Microsoft virtual machine (VM), which kept data secure and restricted to only selected individuals.

No outsider, not even the professor, had access to original data. Instead, he had to work with “summarized” information, which he could not even download.

This cautious approach built a level of trust with the Fire Department that allowed the project to succeed.

Opportunities for the future

Professor Lee now wants to apply the team’s predictive model to other city problems, such as crime and traffic.

Currently, the team is tackling the issue of wheelchair accessibility across the capital. And, the university’s collaboration with authorities has paved the way for a “Seoul Metropolitan Government Big Data Campus” – an initiative that provides space for researchers to access public and private datasets in controlled settings.

To equip his students with the right skills for an AI-enabled world, Professor Lee teaches the essentials, like basic statistics and coding. But he also says they need more to have an impact.

“My students need to know urban planning very well and understand how the city works. That’s the kind of domain knowledge you need to define the right problems. If you’ve defined the right problem, the solution is much easier to find.”

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CTO Kevin Scott on the Intelligent Edge revolution

I’m old enough now to have experienced several distinct waves of transformation brought by digital technology. As a kid, the personal computing revolution captured my imagination and energy with gaming and programming and new ways to create and do work. As a young adult, personal computers were everywhere and the internet and the World Wide Web connected them, and more importantly, the people using them, in ways that allowed communication and information to flow freely, and for work, commerce, creativity and leisure to be done in radically different ways. In my 30s, the smartphone and an incredible ecosystem of apps and services extended the internet to our pockets, making our connections to information and each other more ubiquitous, helping us navigate our way through the physical world, allowing us to buy almost any good or service we can think of, entertaining us in wonderful new ways, and making collaboration to get our work done more powerful than ever.

Even though that’s already a lot of transformation in a short period of time, and technology has never been more present in our lives, I feel like we’re just getting started. The next wave – one that’s already happening – comes when cheap connected devices with powerful sensors become truly ubiquitous in all of our physical environments, and when those devices become powerful enough to use the techniques of artificial intelligence (AI) to interact with their surroundings and the people in them. We call this combination of connected devices with powerful sensors and AI the Intelligent Edge. A year ago, I shared my belief that the Intelligent Edge would unfold as a platform over the next several years in ways that would surprise us by its breadth and diversity. And it already has.

The Intelligent Edge is proving to be the last mile in the convergence of the digital and physical worlds. –whether it’s a mixed-reality device like HoloLens providing a technician with a digital overlay of analytics, diagnostics and documentation for a piece of equipment they are servicing, or smart devices making the places where we live, work and shop more responsive and interactive, safer and more efficient. Intelligent Edge technologies are already making our homes smarter, improving the yields of our farms, monitoring the environment, helping us navigate our work more effectively, and improving our health and safety.

We’re in the middle of a revolution that is more than just smart speakers, security cameras and clever thermostats. Right now, we have in excess of 12 billion devices connected to the internet. It’s forecast that by the end of this calendar year, that number will rise to 20 billion. We anticipate that billions more of these devices are going to connect to the internet in the next few years. It’s a staggering thought. This Internet of Things (IoT) is already many times larger than the universe of personal computers and smartphones combined, and devices on it are becoming more powerful and more intelligent every day. With the advent of 5G, with its higher throughput, lower latency to the cloud, and higher device densities at the edge, we are likely to see the growth of the Intelligent Edge accelerate even further.

It probably comes as no surprise that I’ve been super stoked by each of the big technology platform waves that I’ve personally experienced, from PCs, to the internet, to smartphones. The Intelligent Edge is no different. I can’t keep from tinkering with these technologies, and I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that I’m using bits of the Intelligent Edge platform to build, of all things, an AI-powered siphon vacuum coffee machine. Instead of screens and buttons, my machine has a camera, a microphone, a speaker, a small digital brain and a connection to the cloud. When you focus your attention on it, it notices, and will ask “Would you like a cup of coffee?” When you respond “Yes,” it guides you through the brewing process with a short dialogue. And if you like, it will remember you and your preferences so that you can get your next cup of coffee more quickly.

My coffee machine probably won’t be commercially viable, and no one should mistake my weekend tinkering for a product that might one day show up in the Microsoft store. But one thing that’s become very clear to me as I build this machine is this: The Intelligent Edge parts of the device are neither especially hard nor expensive. I’m having a tougher time designing a safe steam boiler than I am with the AI! The hardware I’m using to run some of the local AI is cheap and readily available, and the software techniques I’m using to split the AI computations between the edge and the cloud are relatively straightforward. The Intelligent Edge and Intelligent Cloud platform that’s already out there for everyone to use is already quite capable. And even though to some, my coffee machine sounds like a crazy sci-fi project, making it a reality doesn’t feel as challenging as writing my first PC program, internet service or mobile app felt in the early days of those platforms.

What I’m most excited about with the Intelligent Edge is not what we’ve already done, nor even what I can imagine might be done with this new platform, but rather, what others will imagine and create as tens of millions of developers, entrepreneurs and innovative thinkers start building new products and businesses with this technology. Given the magnitude of growth ahead of us, and the fact that the platform is becoming more powerful every day, the opportunities for creators, entrepreneurs and businesses are huge. As with any successful platform, the true measure of the Intelligent Edge’s success will be in the breadth and diversity of the things built on top of it. There, I have infinite faith in the vision and ambition of others.

The IoT Signals Report (an annual research survey published by Microsoft) identifies key, industry-relevant trends in IoT. The survey, conducted by individual interviews with more than 3,000 IoT professionals based in Europe, Asia and North America, found that IoT is considered mainstream. Businesses are seeing tremendous value and opportunity in their ability to improve their bottom lines through IoT adoption. Right now, we’re seeing significant advancements in what I call a new world order with the demise of Moore’s law[1] and the collapse of Dennard scaling[2]. This means that compute is no longer becoming cheap at the exact same time that machine learning is becoming an insatiable consumer of compute power. But while this shift is impacting PCs, we will still see a few years where the power and compute capabilities of Intelligent Edge devices will continue to improve exponentially without much increase in cost.

IoT devices that are part of the Intelligent Edge provide businesses with invaluable insights on how to transform processes for operational efficiencies, such as improving the maintenance of vital of equipment before a costly shutdown and accelerating innovation while simultaneously improving safety, for example. As the IoT landscape continues to expand, we can bank on critical breakthroughs in areas that benefit humanity, such as healthcare, conservation, sustainability, accessibility and disaster recovery.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling

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How Lucky Brand and its merchants are uncovering data-driven results with Azure VMware Solutions

Since announcing Azure VMware Solutions at Dell Technologies World this spring, we’ve been energized by the positive feedback we’ve received from our partners and customers who are beginning to move their VMware workloads to Azure. One of these customers is Lucky Brand, a leading retailer that is embracing digital transformation while staying true to its rich heritage. As part of their broader strategy to leverage the innovation possible in the cloud, Lucky Brand is transitioning several VMware workloads to Azure.

“We’re seeing great initial ROI with Azure VMware Solutions. We chose Microsoft Azure as our strategic cloud platform and decided to dramatically reduce our AWS footprint and 3rd Party co-located data centers. We have a significant VMware environment footprint for many of our on-premises business applications.

The strategy has allowed us to become more data driven and allow our merchants and finance analysts the ability to uncover results quickly and rapidly with all the data in a central cloud platform providing great benefits for us in the competitive retail landscape. Utilizing Microsoft Azure and VMware we leverage a scalable cloud architecture and VMware to virtualize and manage the computing resources and applications in Azure in a dynamic business environment.

Since May, we’ve been successfully leveraging these applications on the Azure VMware Solution by CloudSimple platform. We are impressed with the performance, ease of use and the level of support we have received by Microsoft and its partners.” 

Kevin Nehring, CTO, Lucky Brand

Expanding to more regions worldwide and adding new capabilities

Based on customer demand, we are excited to announce that we will expand Azure VMware Solutions to a total of eight regions across the US, Western Europe, and Asia Pacific by end of year.

In addition to expanding to more regions, we are continuing to add new capabilities to Azure VMware Solutions and deliver seamless integration with native Azure services. One example is how we’re expanding the supported Azure VMware Solutions storage options to include Azure NetApp Files by the end of the year. This new capability will allow IT organizations to more easily run storage intensive workloads on Azure VMware Solutions. We are committed to continuously innovating and delivering capabilities based on customer feedback.

Broadening the ecosystem

It is amazing to see the market interest in Azure VMware Solutions and the partner ecosystem building tools and capabilities that support Azure VMware Solutions customer scenarios.

RiverMeadow now supports capabilities to accelerate the migration of VMware environments on Azure VMware Solutions.

“I am thrilled about our ongoing collaboration with Microsoft. Azure VMware Solutions enable enterprise customers to get the benefit of cloud while still running their infrastructure and applications in a familiar, tried and trusted VMware environment. Add with the performance and cost benefits of VMware on Azure, you have a complete solution. I fully expect to see substantial enterprise adoption over the short term as we work with Microsoft’s customers to help them migrate even the most complex workloads to Azure.”

Jim Jordan, President and CEO, RiverMeadow

Zerto has integrated its IT Resilience Platform with Azure VMware Solutions, delivering replication and failover capabilities between Azure VMware Solution by CloudSimple, Azure and any other Hyper-V or VMware environments, keeping the same on-premises environment configurations, and reducing the impact of disasters, logical corruptions, and ransomware infections.

“Azure VMware Solution by CloudSimple, brings the familiarity and simplicity of VMware into Azure public cloud. Every customer and IT pro using VMware will be instantly productive with minimal or no Azure competency. With Zerto, VMware customers gain immediate access to simple point and click disaster recovery and migration capabilities between Azure VMware Solutions, the rest of Azure, and on-premises VMware private clouds. Enabled by Zerto, one of Microsoft’s top ISVs and an award-winning industry leader in VMware-based disaster recovery and cloud migration, delivers native support for Azure VMware Solutions. ”

Peter Kerr, Vice President of Global Alliances, Zerto

Veeam Backup & Replication™ software is specialized in supporting VMware vSphere environments, their solutions will help customers meet the backup demands of organizations deploying Azure VMware Solutions.

“As a leading innovator of Cloud Data Management solutions, Veeam makes it easy for our customers to protect their virtual, physical, and cloud-based workloads regardless of where those reside. Veeam’s support for Microsoft Azure VMware Solutions by CloudSimple further enhances that position by enabling interoperability and portability across multi-cloud environments. With Veeam Backup & Replication, customers can easily migrate and protect their VMware workloads in Azure as part of a cloud-first initiative, create an Azure-based DR strategy, or simply create new Azure IaaS instances – all with the same proven Veeam solutions they already use today.”  

Ken Ringdahl, Vice President of Global Alliances Architecture, Veeam Software

Join us at VMworld

If you plan to attend VMworld this week in San Francisco, stop by our booth and witness Azure VMware Solutions in action; or sit down for a few minutes and listen to one of our mini theater presentations addressing a variety of topics such as Windows Virtual Desktop, Windows Server, and SQL Server on Azure in addition to Azure VMware Solutions!

Learn more about Azure VMware Solutions.

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From farm to cloud to table, ButcherBox serves up a new approach to meat delivery

The path to a future of mining cloud-based data started in a decidedly low-tech way for Boston company ButcherBox after its founder, Mike Salguero, found himself in a Massachusetts parking lot buying garbage bags of beef from a local farmer.

Salguero’s wife, Karlene, has a thyroid condition, and the couple wanted to switch to an anti-inflammatory diet including lean, grass-fed meat. But they found little beyond ground beef and the occasional grass-fed steak at their local grocery stores — hence the parking-lot purchase. That was too much meat for the couple to eat, so Salguero gave some to a friend, who remarked how convenient it would be to have high-quality meat delivered at home.

“That was the initial spark of the idea for ButcherBox,” Salguero says.

The company launched in 2015, delivering boxes of frozen grass-fed beef, free-range organic chicken and heritage breed pork to subscribers, or “members,” around the United States. ButcherBox sells only meats raised without antibiotics or added hormones, ships them in 100 percent curbside-recyclable boxes made of 95 percent recycled materials, and prides itself on partnering with vendors that use sustainable, humane approaches and fair labor practices.

ButcherBox CEO and founder Mike Salguero sits outdoors next to wife Karlene as they hold their twin daughters and their other young daughter sits beside them
ButcherBox CEO and founder Mike Salguero with wife Karlene and their three daughters.

The company offers 21 cuts of meat and subscription boxes ranging from $129 to $270 monthly, depending how many pounds of meat are included.

ButcherBox tapped into a trio of hot retail trends: a demand for sustainable products, consumers’ interest in knowing more about what they’re buying, and an explosion in subscription box companies selling everything from dog toys to fitness gear, even house plants and hygge kits.

ButcherBox doesn’t release sales figures, but Salguero says the company has grown exponentially since its launch, even without seeking venture capital. Collecting and analyzing data became increasingly important as ButcherBox expanded, but the limited data the company had was mainly in Excel spreadsheets and didn’t provide the depth of information employees needed.

Customer service agents, for example, didn’t have access to warehouse data and couldn’t check to see if a member’s box had been filled or where it was. Teams in various departments were pulling data together in ad hoc ways, leading to inconsistent and imprecise insights.

“Depending on which department it was and where they got the data, everyone had their own truths about what was going on in the business,” says Kevin Hall, ButcherBox’s head of technology. “People began to realize there was a need for a single source of truth.”

Salguero puts it another way: “People became entrepreneurial and enterprising in finding ways to answer questions, but as an organization that’s pretty risky, because we don’t even know if it’s right.”

Image of ButcherBox employees posing on the street in front of the company's headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The ButcherBox team at the company’s headquarters in Cambridge, Mass.

So the company turned to Microsoft, adopting Azure as its cloud platform about a year ago. It developed a “demand plan” that uses members’ purchasing data to determine how much meat must be ordered and replenished in fulfillment centers. It enabled its approximately 70 employees to create and read dashboards using Microsoft’s Power BI data visualization tool. It interviewed more than 100 ButcherBox subscribers, then used Azure’s Databricks service to analyze their feedback and organize it into easily understandable reports in Power BI.

The interviews revealed a key insight — that the number one reason people were canceling their subscriptions wasn’t lack of freezer space, as previously thought, but value. Based on that finding, the company implemented an “add-on” program offering members perks (free bacon!) and specials on certain products, often undercutting grocery store prices on those promotional items.

More robust data also enabled the company to better determine how much dry ice is needed for each shipped box based on geographic location — a crucial calculation, since too much ice can cause leaks and too little can mean a thawed shipment.

“If someone doesn’t get his or her box or it shows up late, it’s ruined,” Salguero says. “So really understanding our data — what’s shipping, where the boxes are — became the rallying cry of the company in a big way to understand our members and build out our data infrastructure.”

Photo of a ButcherBox cardboard box, made of 95 percent recycled paper, that the company ships its products in.hat ButcherBox ships its products in
The company uses fully recyclable boxes made of 95 percent recycled cardboard to ship its products.

But even the most sophisticated data can’t necessarily provide the type of information gleaned from talking with people face-to-face. Last year, Salguero embarked on what employees jokingly refer to as his “freezer road show,” visiting members’ homes, asking them about their cooking and eating habits and yes, peering into their freezers.

The exercise provided useful insights about the degree to which members rely on ButcherBox meats to feed their families, Salguero says, and showed that subscribers who most often use the food in their freezers tend to plan out their meals. That finding could help with tackling one of the biggest challenges facing a company that sells frozen meat — which is, ironically, to get members to stop using their freezers so much.

“A lot of people think of a freezer as a savings account,” Salguero says. “It’s there for a rainy day, not necessarily the place you go if you want to eat dinner tonight.”

The company is exploring how technology might be used to get more information about what customers are eating, whether through a meal-planning app or other tool, with the goal of prompting them to move food out of the deep freeze and onto the dinner table.

“All of that is a data problem at its core,” Salguero says. “We should know what members are eating and in what order. If we do our job well, we’ll know that member A is eating through X and they have a pork shoulder left over, so if we’re going to send a recipe, we should be sending one for pork shoulder.”

ButcherBox is now focusing on using data science and analytics to provide more personalized service, starting with identifying “clusters” of members who have similar likes and buying habits to determine which products and services to market to them.

“It doesn’t make sense to show someone beef if they’re really a chicken or salmon member,” Hall says. “We’re really looking to understand the data so we can serve members in a much more personalized way.”

Photo of two bone-in pork chops on a wooden board, with bows of salt and peppercorns and a plate with fresh figs and fresh sage leaves
ButcherBox offers 21 different cuts of meat and a range of custom and curated boxes.

Since data showed that members who buy certain types of boxes are more likely to leave, the company began proactively suggesting different options to those members and introduced new subscription plans with varying delivery schedules.

“We’re giving people more flexibility to switch to a plan that comes less often,” says Reba Hatcher, ButcherBox’s chief of staff. “Giving people those options has been really helpful.”

The company’s approach suits Ismael Santos, who lives in Youngsville, a small city in south-central Louisiana. Santos tried various approaches to get high-quality, sustainably raised meat free of antibiotics and added hormones — driving to a grocery store more than 50 miles away, buying at local farmers markets, splitting a quarter- or half-cow with friends. None of the options was ideal, so Santos signed up for ButcherBox almost a year ago.

“It’s hard to get that quality at a good price, and conveniently and reliably here,” he says. “You can go out and buy beef, but you’re either going to pay a ton or you’re not going to get what you’re looking for sometimes. The cost (of ButcherBox) is good compared with going to a store and buying the same quality and quantity.”

Santos also tried several meal-kit subscription services but didn’t consider them a good value and didn’t like being restricted to cooking a particular meal. With ButcherBox, he gets the main part of his meal and builds around it, picking up other ingredients at his local market as needed and sometimes adding items to his box, like ribs or breakfast sausage.

“I like that you can change it up,” he says.

Photo of seven people, mostly ButcherBox employees, standing a ranch between two farm vehicles, with a herd of black cows in background
The company partners with vendors that use sustainable, humane approaches and fair labor practices.

ButcherBox is still in the early stages of using Azure, but Salguero says the move has already radically changed how employees think and operate.

“It’s pretty amazing to see the cultural change because of what we’re doing with Microsoft,” he says. “It’s a totally different conversation. People used to sit around a table and say, ‘I don’t really know what’s happening.’ Now it’s like, ‘Did you pull the data for that?’ or, ‘Let’s look at this dashboard and make a decision based on what we see.’

“The culture has really moved to a reliance on the data that we have,” Salguero says. “People trust the data, and it’s only getting better and better.”

Top photo: ButcherBox CEO and founder Mike Salguero. (All photos courtesy of ButcherBox)

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ZF expands Partnership with Microsoft to Develop Digital Services

Whether in the passenger car sector or for commercial vehicles, ZF is well on the road toward Vision Zero. Autonomous vehicles, innovative safety systems and intelligent mobility solutions contribute to a future of road traffic with zero accidents and zero emissions. This will be accompanied by digitalizing the entire value chain. The technological backbone for these applications is the ZF Cloud based on Microsoft Azure. The closer collaboration with Microsoft allows ZF the development of even more customer focused and tailor-made solutions.

“The strategic partnership with Microsoft will allow us to work even more intensely on intelligent and networked mobility solutions of the future,” explains Mamatha Chamarthi, chief digital officer at ZF Friedrichshafen AG. “This puts us in the position of developing new digital services, on the one hand, and to adapt them perfectly to specific customer needs, on the other.”

Sanjay Ravi, General Manager, Automotive Industry, at Microsoft, adds: “We are excited to expand our collaboration with ZF. Microsoft Azure’s cloud, AI and IoT capabilities enable ZF to deliver highly secure mobility services at a global scale with a faster time to market and respond to the unique needs of their customers and partners worldwide.”

At the CES trade show, ZF will present their initial application options for the expanded platform. These options were developed with various partners and will encompass diverse areas of use:

Comprehensive fleet management

VDL, one of the leading manufacturer groups in the bus sector, uses the ZF IoT platform not only for its fleet management solution being sold to its customers, but also for its own fleet. The platform provides VDL a complete overview of the efficiency of its electric and diesel vehicles. By the end of 2018, more than 300 VDL electric buses had been equipped with the solution. In the process, VDL uses the entire bandwidth of Microsoft Azure services – from the Edge device to the cloud-based platform.

Smart transmissions through predictive maintenance

With the new Predictive Maintenance function, ZF is preparing its successful modular TraXon transmission for the digital future in the commercial vehicle industry. Starting in 2019, vehicle manufacturers and fleet operators can proactively plan vehicle maintenance using the cloud solution.

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LG partners with Microsoft to accelerate an automotive revolution

Signing of MoU between LG and Microsoft group image

Employing Microsoft Azure Technology to advance LG’s AI-driven vehicle strategy

LAS VEGAS, Jan. 8, 2019 — LG Electronics (LG) and Microsoft entered into a memorandum of understanding to enhance and further grow LG’s autonomous vehicle and infotainment system business. Under the terms of the partnership, LG will accelerate the transformation of its existing digital platform for the vehicle industry, seen as key growth engines for the company, by leveraging Microsoft’s Azure cloud and artificial intelligence technologies along with LG’s future self-driving software.

LG will apply Microsoft’s AI knowhow to its Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), Driver-Status Monitoring Camera (DSM) and Multi-Purpose Front Camera products and incorporate Microsoft’s Virtual Assistant Solution Accelerator in LG’s infotainment systems. And with Azure Data Box service, data captured on the road can be uploaded automatically to create a library that helps the self-driving software grow even smarter.

In addition, LG plans to build innovative digital development and testing grounds employing state-of-the-art technology. High performance computing (HPC) and graphics processing unit (GPU) supported by Microsoft Azure will drastically reduce the time required for LG AI self-driving software to learn and evolve. Road and traffic patterns in cities that would normally require more than a full day for self-driving systems to comprehend would take only minutes with Azure.

And Azure can help AI self-driving software learn diverse patterns displayed by drivers as well as recognize and distinguish between pedestrians and other objects. By embedding AI self-driving software enhanced by Azure within the ADAS, performance of the DSM and Multi-Purpose Front Camera can be dramatically improved.

In addition to its ability to train AI self-driving software, Azure also has a voice-enabled Virtual Assistant Solution Accelerator with its AI services. With help from Azure, LG’s vehicle infotainment system will allow drivers to easily and quickly check traffic conditions on the road, search for nearby restaurants, call up favorite songs and more.

“Our expectation is that the combination of Microsoft’s advanced cloud infrastructure with LG’s fast-growing automotive components business will accelerate the self-driving auto industry as a whole,” said Kim Jin-yong, president of LG’s Vehicle Component Solutions Company. “We’re confident that the combination of Microsoft and LG technologies will create a new benchmark in autonomous auto AI.”

“Together LG and Microsoft can help shape the future of transportation,” said Sanjay Ravi, general manager, automotive industry at Microsoft. “Working together, we can empower automakers to deliver differentiated mobility experiences, create new services and revenue opportunities, and to build safer, more intelligent and more sustainable vehicles.”

Top image caption: Kim Jin-yong, President of LG’s Vehicle Component Solutions Company (center left), Chris Capossela, Microsoft’s Chief Marketing Officer (center right), and other executives celebrate the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding on the enhancement and growth LG’s autonomous vehicle and infotainment system businesses.

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Cubic enables Microsoft Connected Vehicle Platform

Cubic Telecom, a leading connectivity management software provider for the automotive and IoT industries, today announced ahead of next week’s Mobile World Congress event that it is collaborating with Microsoft on its Microsoft Connected Vehicle Platform (MCVP). Cubic Telecom will be the first seamless connectivity provider as a core service offering to MCVP for a global market. MCVP is a set of services built on Microsoft Azure designed to empower the automotive industry to create customer connected driving experiences.

Cubic Telecom’s core network spans more than 180 countries and over 65 mobile operator partnerships, with over 2M drivers already using Cubic’s connected car solution. This gives MCVP the power to create and deliver global scalability with local connectivity to automotive manufacturers. Through Cubic Telecom’s advanced eSIM technology, applications and technologies will be embedded into vehicles at the manufacturing stage, enabling simple logistics, Over-The-Air software updates, and giving automakers the power to collect data on cars’ performance.

Barry Napier, Cubic Telecom CEO said, “As global car manufacturers undertake to digitally transform their businesses, they are fuelled not just to achieve improved economies of scale, but rather to meet the scalability requirements for application processing, performance, storage, security and software updates. Our PACE Platform continuously demonstrates the ability to scale open interfaces and flexible workflow operations.”

“We are delighted to extend further our collaboration with Microsoft into the Microsoft Connected Vehicle Program Team. The collaboration between Cubic PACE, MCVP and Volkswagen is a prime example of digital innovation and we are proud to be chosen as the first global connectivity provider for MCVP.”

To enable a connected car is a complicated process for automakers and Microsoft sought to simplify this through a flexible and collaborative ecosystem. With MCVP the automotive manufacturer will enjoy the freedom to choose the vendors they wish to work with through Cubic’s PACE Platform. Cubic will provide global connectivity, with potential to include value-added services in the future.

Volkswagen is using Azure and MCVP for its Volkswagen Automotive Cloud, and Cubic on Azure for the connectivity solution. “We welcome the ecosystem coming together to provide a seamless solution for customers”, said Heiko Huettel, Volkswagen Automotive Cloud at Volkswagen.

Tara Prakriya, Partner Group Program Manager of MCVP and Mobility at Microsoft, said, “The automotive industry is experiencing a transformational period and connectivity will have an increased role to play in the future of driving. The Microsoft Connected Vehicle Program consists of a set of services that enable automotive manufacturers build global scalable connected vehicle solutions and deliver unique digital experiences for their customers.”

Prakriya added, “We chose Cubic Telecom as the first global connectivity provider for MCVP as it has a proven track-record in the automotive marketplace. With Cubic’s proven and scaled connected services, hosted on Microsoft Azure, we look forward to bringing the MCVP solution to market together at pace and discovering more possibilities for technological innovations.”

MCVP will power next-generation, connected vehicles with advanced navigation, predictive maintenance, remote monitoring of car features and more.

About Cubic

Cubic Telecom is a global connectivity platform company that offers mobility solutions that power connectivity for leading Internet of things (IoT), machine-to-machine (M2M) and mobile device companies across the globe.

An expert in Connected Intelligence, Cubic Telecom enables global scalability with local connectivity anytime, anywhere. Cubic provides connectivity in over 100 countries; the most robust network, device and retail partnerships worldwide; and flexible over-the-air (OTA) device management for clients and partners.

Cubic creates connectivity where there was none before, with a belief in the future of things: a future where everything is connected. Cubic’s vision of interconnectivity will improve lives, and make the world a more interesting and intelligent place to be. Clients which also believe in this work include Audi, Panasonic, Volkswagen, Woolworths and Rakuten.

Based in Dublin Ireland, Cubic Telecom’s partners and customers include some of the world’s leading Fortune 100 tablet and notebook manufacturers, retailers, and M2M and automotive companies. The company is privately held with over €75 million in funding by Audi Electronics Venture GmbH, Qualcomm, Valid, Enterprise Ireland and the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund, among others.

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IoT Plug and Play is now available in preview

Today we are announcing that IoT Plug and Play is now available in preview! At Microsoft Build in May 2019, we announced IoT Plug and Play and described how it will work seamlessly with IoT Central. We demonstrated how IoT Plug and Play simplifies device integration by enabling solution developers to connect and interact with IoT devices using device capability models defined with the Digital Twin definition language. We also announced a set of partners who have launched devices and solutions that are IoT Plug and Play enabled. You can find their IoT Plug and Play certified devices at the Azure Certified for IoT device catalog.

With today’s announcement, solution developers can start using Azure IoT Central or Azure IoT Hub to build solutions that integrate seamlessly with IoT devices enabled with IoT Plug and Play. We have also launched a new Azure Certified for IoT portal, for device partners interested to streamline the device certification submission process and get devices into the Azure IoT device catalog quickly.

This article outlines how solution developers can use IoT Plug and Play devices in their IoT solutions, and how device partners can build and certify their products to be listed in the catalog.

Faster device integration for solution developers

Azure IoT Central is a fully managed IoT Software as a Service (SaaS) offering that makes it easy to connect, monitor, and manage your IoT devices and products. Azure IoT Central simplifies the initial setup of your IoT solution and cuts the management burden, operational costs, and overhead of a typical IoT project. Azure IoT Central integration with IoT Plug and Play takes this one step further by allowing solution developers to integrate devices without writing any embedded code. IoT solution developers can choose devices from a large set of IoT Plug and Play certified devices to quickly build and customize their IoT solutions end-to-end. Solution developers can start with a certified device from the device catalog and customize the experience for the device, such as editing display names or units. Solution developers can also add dashboards for solution operators to visualize the data; as part of this new release, developers have a broader set of visualizations to choose from. There is also the option to auto generate dashboards and visualizations to get up and running quickly. Once the dashboard and visualizations are created, solution developers can run simulations based on real models from the device catalog. Developers can also integrate with the commands and properties exposed by IoT Plug and Play capability models to enable operators to effectively manage their device fleets. IoT Central will automatically load the capability model of any certified device, enabling a true Plug and Play experience!

Another option available for developers who’d like more customization is to build IoT solutions with Azure IoT Hub and IoT Plug and Play devices. With today’s release, Azure IoT Hub now supports RESTful digital twin APIs that expose the capabilities of IoT Plug and Play device capability models and interfaces. Developers can set properties to configure settings like alarm thresholds, send commands for operations such as resetting a device, route telemetry, and query which devices support a specific interface. The most convenient way is to use the Azure IoT SDK for Node.js (other languages are coming soon). And all devices enabled for IoT Plug and Play in the Azure Certified for IoT device catalog will work with IoT Hub just like they work with IoT Central.

An image of the certified device browsing page.

Streamlined certification process for device partners

The Azure Certified for IoT device catalog allows customers to quickly find the right Azure IoT certified device to quickly start building IoT solutions. To help our device partners certify their products as IoT Plug and Play compatible, we have revamped and streamlined the Azure Certified for IoT program by launching a new portal and submission process. With the Azure Certified for IoT portal, device partners can define new products to be listed in the Azure Certified for IoT device catalog and specify product details such as physical dimensions, description, and geo availability. Device partners can manage their IoT Plug and Play models in their company model repository, which limits access to only their own employees and select partners, as well as the public model repository. The portal also allows device partners to certify their products by submitting to an automated validation process that verifies correct implementation of the Digital Twin definition language and required interfaces implementation.

An image of the device page for the MXChip-Certified.

Device partners will also benefit from investments in developer tooling to support IoT Plug and Play. The Azure IoT Device Workbench extension for VS Code adds IntelliSense for easy authoring of IoT Play and Play device models. It also enables code generation to create C device code that implements the IoT Plug and Play model and provides the logic to connect to IoT Central, without customers having to worry about provisioning or integration with IoT Device SDKs.

The new tooling capabilities also integrates with the model repository service for seamless publishing of device models. In addition to the Azure IoT Device Workbench, device developers can use tools like the Azure IoT explorer and the Azure IoT extension for Azure Command-line Interface. Device code can be developed with the Azure IoT SDK for C and for Node.js.

An image of the Azure IoT explorer.

Connect sensors on Windows and Linux gateways to Azure

If you are using a Windows or Linux gateway device and you have sensors that are already connected to the gateway, then you can make these sensors available to Azure by simply editing a JSON configuration. We call this technology the IoT Plug and Play bridge. The bridge allows sensors on Windows and Linux to just work with Azure by bridging these sensors from the IoT gateway to IoT Central or IoT Hub. On the IoT gateway device, the sensor bridge leverages OS APIs and OS plug and play capabilities to connect to downstream sensors and uses the IoT Plug and Play APIs to communicate with IoT Central and IoT Hub on Azure. A solution builder can easily select from sensors enumerated on the IoT device and register them in IoT Central or IoT Hub. Once available in Azure, the sensors can be remotely accessed and managed. We have native support for Modbus and a simple serial protocol for managing and obtaining sensor data from MCUs or embedded devices and we are continuing to add native support for other protocols like MQTT. On Windows, we also support cameras, and general device health monitoring for any device the OS can recognize (such as USB peripherals). You can extend the bridge with your own adapters to talk to other types of devices (such as I2C/SPI), and we are working on adding support for more sensors and protocols (such as HID).

Next steps