Microsoft says it plans to spend $5 billion on the internet of things in the next five years. Generally these announcements are pretty much marketing fluff trying to put a number on basic business expenses that a company has to implement to stay a market leader. So I asked Microsoft for more information on the spending to find out how much of this was the cost of doing business and how much was new.
A Microsoft spokesperson didn’t get into too much detail, but did say that in the last four years Microsoft has spent $1.5 billion on IoT, so this is definitely a boost. The money will be spread out across Microsoft Azure IoT, Microsoft IoT Hub, Windows IoT, and sales and training for those products. It also includes “planned resourcing in hiring, research and product development, partner enablement and training and infrastructure investments.”
Microsoft is a real contender in IoT deployments, especially with big companies. While many startups are using AWS tools, when I talk to industrial clients, Azure is by far the most popular option they cite. And $5 billion more in investment will certainly help Microsoft maintain its advantage.
Thanks for digging a little more into Microsoft’s investment in IoT. I’m personally pretty curious to see to what extent security is tied to the $5 Billion IoT investment. How core is it in that investment? Having the right PKI, certificates, and authentication mechanisms across all those IoT devices is critical in developing and maintaining secure solutions.
As we’ve seen with the “good” Internet connected devices, update processes are absolutely vital to having a secure ecosystem. An update process that’s not cryptographically secured end-to-end isn’t an update process at all.
I would like to see Microsoft take more of a lead innovator role in IoT. Microsoft IoT is interesting on the Raspberry Pi. I find it more useful than Raspian- a big part is because of all of the free IoT training on MSDN. The videos actually work and you can hear what the people are saying- which is kind of important for someone like me with trouble hearing. Raspian just seems more suited for toy helicopters and robots- which is a huge industry- but I am personally all about embedded water sensors for home and agriculture.