A Connected Future: Microsoft Releases Azure IoT Gateway SDK Beta

Over the last few months, through both my work at Cymax & Constant Retail as well as ongoing research work at the University of British Columbia, I have spent a lot of time exploring technologies relating to the Internet of Things (IoT). As many of my industry peers agree, the idea of collecting data from potentially millions of sensors while using this data to both improve operational performance and the customer experience is deeply attractive. For example, in the logistics and freight arena (a segment which Cymax has deep competency), the ability to track a product through its transportation life-cycle has many implications. In particular, data collected from sensors attached to inventory in transit has the potential to reduce freight time and cost, reduce the likelihood of damaged or lost inventory (which in a consumer products business can significantly impact both returns and cancellations), reduce insurance costs, mitigate risk, shorten the inventory turnover time, impact revenue recognition and corporate reporting, while also significantly improving the customer experience by enabling profitable next day or same day delivery. These advantages, along with many others that I have shared while teaching operations management at BCIT, enable organizations who successfully build and maintain such systems to make sense of the world in a way that few competitors can. 

While there has been much discussion over the last year around the future of IoT, as of today, I have seen few organizations successfully set up their infrastructure in such a manner that they can capitalize on the evolving IoT opportunity. Similarly, at Cymax, after transitioning last fall to Microsoft Azure, I have been closely watching Microsoft's evolution in this space, waiting to see how their initial IoT roadmap would support our own work as we consolidate our systems and grow into a truly world class data driven organization. Excitingly, on April 29, 2016, Microsoft announced the release of the Azure IoT Gateway SDK beta. This release, which I am currently reviewing, enables developers and ISV's to easily build and deploy IoT solutions, reducing the work that IoT technology teams need to do in order to create robust IoT gateways & systems. Importantly, this release includes a complete yet evolving framework which allows organizations to create  extensible gateway solutions that can send data from multiple devices - including legacy devices and monitoring systems - to their main cloud connection.

While the initial framework has been impressive, what I have been more impressed with is Microsoft's continued openness when it comes to their new cloud technology. In particular, by creating a new IoT technology stack that supports many different operating systems and building the gateway with ANSI C on top of a platform abstraction layer, Microsoft has increased the number of gateway solutions available for creation. Furthermore, in the spirit of openness and sharing, Microsoft has posted their entire gateway codebase on GitHub. This posting has given developers, including those on our many Cymax teams, the ability to extend and contribute functionality to these libraries.

As I look forward at the future of IoT I remain very excited about the potential that this release unlocks. Using these new tools, Azure developers can begin to build solutions which will help them overcome the initial challenges faced by many IoT teams including the connection of legacy devices. Moreover, analytics & data science teams similar to the one that I lead at Cymax can use these gateways to collect data that can be cleaned and modeled using scalable machine learning processes. This area alone has significant untapped potential! 

Over the last 6 months I have had the privilege of working very closely with many Microsoft products and have been very pleased in nearly every respect. With this in mind, I look forward to seeing how these products evolve over the next 6 months and will be watching the IoT product roadmap quite closely. I also look forward to sharing my experiences here and wish everyone who is experimenting with either this toolkit or other IoT solution stacks the best of luck!