Microsoft IoT Central is now available in Public Preview!

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a business revolution enabled by technology and is no longer just for early adopters, it offers tremendous business opportunities.

As already explained in this blogpost, the path to build, secure and provision a scalable IoT solution from device to cloud can be complex. Evolving products with IoT in most cases require some up-front investment and a whole new set of skills to be learned.

With Microsoft IoT Central, a new SaaS solution, Microsoft is helping to solve these challenges.

Meet Microsoft IoT Central

Microsoft IoT Central was first announced in April 2017, since then Microsoft has been working with partners and customers to align business and user scenarios with the product functionality in a private preview mode, today Microsoft IoT central is available in public preview.

Microsoft IoT Central is a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) offering that reduces the complexity of IoT Solutions, it is fully managed and makes it easy to create IoT solutions by removing management burdens, operational costs and overhead of a typical IoT project.

A silver bullet for IoT?

There’s more than one approach when building an IoT Solution with the Microsoft Azure platform. With the announcement of Microsoft IoT Central it’s important to determine whether you need a PaaS or SaaS offering.

SaaS solutions allow you to get started quickly with a pre-configured IoT solution offering where PaaS solutions provide the building blocks for companies to construct customized IoT Solutions.

The decision PaaS vs SaaS is depending on your business, expertise and the amount of control and customization desired. All these topics are important to make the decision between PaaS and SaaS.

If you need more information please check out following announcement blogposts by Microsoft:

• Microsoft IoT Central broadens reach with simplicity of SaaS for enterprise-grade IoT
• Microsoft IoT Central delivers low-code way to build IoT solutions fast
• Microsoft IoT Central demo

I’ll be further exploring this new Microsoft offering in the next coming days and keep you posted on my findings and the outcomes.

Cheers,

Glenn