News

Microsoft Azure Heads IoT Platform Research Report, Edging AWS

• By David Ramel
• 05/29/2020

Microsoft Azure outpaced perennial cloud computing champion Amazon Web Services (AWS) as the top Internet of Things (IoT) platform in a new research report.

While market leader AWS almost always takes top honors in such cloud surveys and reports, Azure was deemed No. 1 in "completeness" in a new report from Counterpoint Research.

The Hong Kong based firm -- with analysts around the globe including the United States -- used its proprietary CORE (COmpetitive Rankings & Evaluation) evaluation framework to compare 20 leading IoT platform players, with criteria including more than 35 capabilities, measuring completeness, comprehensiveness, and competitiveness.

While the cloud giants might be expected to lead in such rankings, the third member of the "Big 3," Google Cloud, actually place sixth in the overall "completeness" ranking, behind Huawei, PTC ThingWorx and IBM Watson IoT.

"Microsoft Azure IoT platform leads the overall evaluation in 26 out of 35 capabilities across Edge IoT, Cloud IoT, and Platform Performance categories. Coming from a strong enterprise cloud business, Microsoft Azure IoT is the only end-to-end platform that has successfully built its Edge IoT capabilities and offers greater interoperability with other value chain players."

The 20 top platforms included the cloud platforms, hardware vendors and software vendors. Here's how Counterpoint summarized each of those camps:

• Cloud-first incumbents such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, Baidu, IBM Watson, Alibaba Cloud, and Cloudera have successfully extended their IoT platform capabilities from the cloud to the edge. This end-to-end offering has helped them score well in terms of “completeness” in our evaluation.
• Hardware vendors such as Huawei and Cisco that lead in terms of edge IoT endpoints, networking, and computing components, have also been successfully integrating their offerings with edge and cloud IoT capabilities. Thus, these vendors also score well on completeness, expanding their offering.
• Software vendors such as SAP, PTC, WebNMS, Nutanix, and Software AG which are successful enterprise software companies, have added robust IoT Application Enablement Platform (AEP) capabilities to nicely complement their existing business. These vendors have been expanding their edge and cloud IoT capabilities through in-house development, partnerships, and acquisitions.

"IoT is becoming more pervasive as more and more devices are being connected to the cloud via the internet to monitor, analyze, and take action," Counterpoint said. "However, there is an increasing need for real-time collection, processing, and analysis of this data within the device or nearby gateway i.e. close to or actually at the edge of the network so that actions can be taken almost instantaneously. This is leading us to the intelligent edge or Intelligent Internet of Everything (IIoE) in which real-time AI/ML-based computing is embedded at the network's edge."

More information can be found in a May 19 news release and the Counterpoint Research web site.