As we move beyond intelligent assets to connecting intelligent environments—and eventually, entire ecosystems—simplifying and accelerating IoT adoption is paramount. One of the primary questions facing businesses is how to get to value fastest while navigating the complexity of implementation.
Our focus at Microsoft is delivering capabilities and services that accelerate IoT solutions; one of the core ways we’re doing this is through IoT Plug and Play. This open approach uses Digital Twin Definition Language (DTDL) to allow IoT devices to easily declare their capabilities to cloud solutions. By eliminating the hours of coding required, it simplifies device and solution development and reduces the integration time for full-scale deployments.
IoT Plug and Play has a critical role in paving the way for broader adoption of IoT platforms like Azure Digital Twins. Today, I’m pleased to share the IoT Plug and Play capabilities that are simplifying IoT for mainstream adoption, including support for edge modules and Azure IoT Central.
Across organizations, integrating IoT devices and solutions can be a complex, time-consuming process. By simplifying device integration, IoT Plug and Play helps remove entry barriers and creates new IoT device opportunities, reducing development time, cost, and complexity in the process. IoT Plug and Play also enables greater solution scalability since more devices can be added seamlessly down the road.
“As IoT becomes more prevalent in various industries, a mechanism to make it easier to connect the cloud and devices is essential,” says Takashi Kodama, Senior Vice President of SB Technology. “With IoT Plug and Play, we as a cloud service provider are very pleased to be able to quickly resolve customer business problems by providing a no-code connection to devices. We will continue to promote digital transformation for customers in Japan, Asia, and on a global scale together with Microsoft.”
Hardware partners using IoT Plug and Play can also build devices that easily integrate with other cloud solutions based on Azure IoT Central and third-party solutions built on top of Azure IoT Hub or Azure Digital Twins. These partners can get their devices certified and included in the Azure Certified Device catalog, allowing companies to easily find compatible devices and speed up solution development.
According to Linch Lin, CEO at Sysinno Technology, “By making our devices IoT Plug and Play-compatible, Azure users can easily integrate iAeris IAQ devices into their platforms and start monitoring air quality.” He says that including their devices in the Azure Certified Device catalog has expanded product and brand visibility.
Johnny Wu, Senior Manager from Innodisk says IoT Plug and Play eliminates hours of coding and streamlines integration efforts in a fragmented market. “It provides a certified model that helps our customers build solutions with a quick and easy standard.”
The list of IoT Plug and Play-enabled devices from Microsoft partners continues to grow and includes device support from leading semiconductor partners such as STMicroelectronics, NXP, Renesas, and Microchip.
IoT Plug and Play introduces a new approach to building IoT solutions by decoupling the software on the device and solution in the cloud. And now with the added support of IoT Plug and Play in Azure IoT Central, devices can be integrated in minutes.
Azure IoT Central accelerates secure, scalable, enterprise-grade IoT solutions by making it fast and easy to connect, configure, update, and manage devices. Once IoT Plug and Play-enabled devices are added to Azure IoT Central, it’s simple to enable features such as monitoring, alerts, and device management jobs. Companies can also pair Azure IoT Central solution templates with IoT Plug and Play-enabled devices, packaging them into industry-specific, turnkey solutions that can easily scale to multiple deployments.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out the simplified pricing tier for Azure IoT Central, which is less than $1 per year per device. Designed for devices transmitting a few messages each day (up to every two hours), the new ST0 tier enables scenarios like smart buildings, fleet management, and predictive maintenance.
Additionally, IoT Plug and Play now supports edge modules, giving developers greater flexibility for implementing edge modules using their protocol of choice. This functionality makes connecting existing sensors and brownfield devices substantially easier and faster, because there is no reprogramming required. IoT Edge developers can update their modules to support IoT Plug and Play interfaces.
IoT Plug and Play bridge is an open-source application that lets solution builders connect existing sensors and devices attached to a Windows or Linux gateway as IoT Plug and Play devices—all with little to no code. IoT Plug and Play bridge, now generally available, can be deployed on any IoT device, industrial PC, server, or gateway running Windows 10 or Linux. This increases the breadth of device types that can easily integrate with an IoT solution. You can run the bridge as a native application or run it as an IoT Edge module, giving you the flexibility to configure the bridge from the cloud using IoT Edge deployments. Additionally, you can extend the bridge to support your own protocols by authoring your own adapters.
IoT Plug and Play is a comprehensive interoperability solution that is unique to Microsoft. No other IoT solution on the market provides the breadth of capabilities IoT Plug and Play offers—or the ecosystem of IoT Plug and Play-enabled devices. Looking to get started with IoT Plug and Play?
You must be a registered user to add a comment. If you've already registered, sign in. Otherwise, register and sign in.