Author: Tony Shakib

Feed: Microsoft Azure Blog. Author: Tony Shakib. This blog post has been co-authored by Charlie Lagervik, Principal Program Manager. Consumers today demand flexibility and convenience in how they purchase everything from groceries to home goods. In addition to shopping online, they are increasingly using mobile devices and other digital services to make in-store shopping more efficient and convenient. In response, retailers are striving to reimagine their physical store footprints to drive new and improved shopping experiences. Leading retailers are rapidly developing new solutions to deliver a retail experience that drives loyalty, both online and in stores. Common challenges to implementing ... Read More

Feed: Microsoft Azure Blog. Author: Tony Shakib. Simplifying industrial IoT device connectivity has been top of mind for many of us at Microsoft. Recently we dramatically expanded our ability to support faster operational technology (OT) to cloud connectivity for up to 80 percent of all industrial equipment as part of our collaboration with key players in our partner ecosystem. This is big news—and something that everyone working on or selling IoT solutions should know as many companies struggle with connectivity implementation. Simply said, connecting existing industrial assets to the cloud just got a lot easier and you’ll save thousands of ... Read More

Feed: Microsoft Azure Blog. Author: Tony Shakib. Digital transformation in manufacturing has the potential to increase annual global economic value by $4.5 trillion according to the IDC MarketScape.i With so much upside, manufacturers are looking at how technologies like IoT, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to optimize supply chains, improve factory performance, accelerate product innovation, and enhance service offerings. Digital transformation starts by collecting data from machines on the plant floor, assets in the supply chain, or products being used by customers. This data can be combined with other business data and then modeled and analyzed ... Read More

Feed: Microsoft Azure Blog. Author: Tony Shakib. The pace of technological change is relentless across all markets. Edge computing continues to play an essential role in allowing data to be managed closer to its source, where workloads can range from basic services like data filtering and de-duplication to advanced capabilities like event-driven processing. Gartner estimates that by 2025 75 percent of Enterprise data will be generated at the Edge. As computing resources and IoT networking devices become more powerful, the ability to manage vast amounts of data near the edge will mean infrastructure and operations teams are required to manage ... Read More

Feed: Microsoft Azure Blog. Author: Tony Shakib. Digital twins have moved from an exciting concept to reality. More companies than ever are connecting assets and production networks with sensors and using analytics to optimize operations across machinery, plants, and industrial networks. As exact virtual representations of the physical environment, digital twins incorporate historical and real-time data to enable sophisticated spatial analysis of key relationships. Teams can use digital twins to model the impact of process changes before putting them into production, reducing time, cost, and risk. For the second year in a row, Gartner has identified digital twins as one ... Read More

Feed: Microsoft Azure Blog. Author: Tony Shakib. Accenture and Avanade won the 2019 Microsoft Internet of Things Partner of the Year award this past spring. At the Microsoft Inspire partner conference in July, Brendan Mislin, Managing Director, Industry X.0 IoT Lead at Accenture, shared some insights and best practices that have helped this award-winning partner unlock the value of Azure IoT for our mutual customers. Figure 1 Petrofac, a leading oilfield services company, leverages Accenture’s Connected Construction solution Five of the best practices Mislin shared are below. For the complete discussion, view the interview. 1.    Expect IoT opportunities in all ... Read More

Feed: Microsoft Azure Blog. Author: Tony Shakib. Figure 1. Petrofac is a leading oilfield services company Petrofac unlocks value for energy customers Petrofac, designs, builds, operates, and maintains oil, gas, and renewable energy assets. The company is committed to digital transformation. It looks to unlock value for itself and its clients using technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), automation, machine learning, predictive analytics, digital twin, and Edge computing. “This is an exciting time for Petrofac,” explains Fady Sleiman, Chief Digital Officer, Petrofac. “We are working to incorporate digital platforms within our business and combine these with our ... Read More

Feed: Microsoft Azure Blog. Author: Tony Shakib. We recently spent time with Mesh Systems, a Microsoft Gold Cloud platform partner based in Carmel, Indiana, to understand what a day in the life of an Azure IoT partner looks like. They shared some of their recent IoT customer engagements and talked about the types of everyday challenges Azure IoT partners face like building an IoT solution with legacy endpoints, how to approach tracking assets through a supply chain, and integrating an IoT solution with a business application. Finally, we discussed what best practices have driven the success of their IoT practice ... Read More

Feed: Microsoft Azure Blog. Author: Tony Shakib. As a leader in the IoT cloud ecosystem, Microsoft enables a full stack of business applications, within different industries, across the intelligent edge and intelligent cloud. The continued growth of the IoT industry is going to be a transformative force across all organizations. Microsoft and SAP have collaborated for over two decades to enable enterprise SAP solution deployments and the partnership has expanded across the Industrial Internet Consortium, the OPC Foundation, and the Platform Industrie 4.0. At Mobile World Congress in February, SAP and Microsoft announced our extended collaboration to physical assets in ... Read More

Feed: Microsoft Azure Blog. Author: Tony Shakib. If you’ve welded two pieces of metal together, chances are you’ve used equipment from ESAB, a business unit of Colfax Corporation. Started in Sweden in 1904, ESAB was acquired by Colfax in 2012, and offers a broad portfolio of welding, cutting, and gas management equipment to customers in virtually every industry across the globe including agriculture, building construction, energy, light and heavy manufacturing, transportation, and even medical and hospitals. Wherever things are made, ESAB is there. With the evolution of the Internet of Things (IoT), Colfax saw an opportunity to transform its businesses ... Read More