Microsoft announced Azure Location Based Services to offer location capabilities to its enterprise customers.
Azure Location Based Services, which will be available globally in more than 30 languages in 2018, are integrated directly into Azure, enabling enterprise customers to add Location Based Services to their existing Azure cloud solutions.
These new location capabilities will provide critical geographical data to power use cases, including Internet of Things (IoT) asset tracking, fleet management, logistics, automotive, urban planning, retail and more to cloud developers.
“A department of transportation can now use Azure Location Based Services to analyze and improve traffic in congested cities, freight companies can provide improved fleet management and logistics, and all businesses can track the location of assets and be notified when their location changes,” said Sam George, director, Microsoft Azure IoT.
TomTom will supply location data on Azure Location Based Services, providing Microsoft with location and mapping capabilities. Azure Location Based Services include a set of APIs that provide mapping, search, routing, traffic and time zones that will be available through Azure.
Microsoft customers will benefit from location data from TomTom’s global community and its global partner network, whose users provide active and passive map and traffic data insights. Azure Location Based Services customers will benefit from contributions of millions of connected devices worldwide.
“By building on top of Microsoft’s cloud, this will make our data more accessible than ever and will empower developers to use APIs to light up mapping scenarios for both consumer and commercial customers,” said Anders Truelsen, managing director of BU Licensing at TomTom.
Cubic Telecom, an Irish-based global telecommunications service provider in the IoT and automotive sectors, has built a proof of concept that uses the services to rank the effectiveness of the charging station placements and suggest new charging locations based on network hotspots using their aggregated (and anonymous) connectivity data.
Fathym, a U.S.-based IoT solutions company, is using the Azure Location Based services to help cities and government agencies visualize road weather conditions on a map and optimize for other routes if weather conditions are unsafe.
Esri, a mapping and geographic information system (GIS) technology provider, will use Azure Location Based Services to provide location data management, digital mapping and geographic analytics, provided through Esri’s ArcGIS suite and developer APIs.
Microsoft said developers and enterprises can build location-aware solutions on Azure, leveraging the same billing, account and Azure infrastructure as all other Azure services.
