New Azure IoT integration with device connectivity platforms brings the best of the “Internet” and the “Things” together, making both hardware connectivity and Cloud development simple.

Electric Imp and Particle, each in their own unique way, offer device connectivity platforms for seamlessly, securely, and reliably connecting Things to the Internet. To complete their solutions, and give easy access to the power of the Cloud to their customers, both companies now offer a seamless integration with Azure IoT Hub. Once device data lands in Azure through IoT Hub, it can easily be analyzed for insights, stored, and visualized, opening up a wide range of capabilities such as predictive maintenance, remote monitoring, and full integration into Line of Business Applications for workflows automation.

Making IoT easy, yet secure and powerful

The IoT device lifecycle management is not always an easy task: to securely provision, connect, communicate with, monitor, update, manage, and retire IoT devices requires deep hardware expertise. Particle and Electric Imp both propose unique answers to make this simpler and more secure.

But securely connecting devices to the Cloud is not all that is required. In order to make the most out of the Things and harness their data, you need powerful and easy to configure Cloud services to analyze the data on the flight, instantly get insights from millions of data points, easily browse through and visualize huge amounts of data, automate notifications, optimize maintenance processes… Azure IoT offers a variety of Platform-as-a-Service solutions to address these new IoT scenarios.

IoT Hub integration with the Particle Cloud and with the Electric Imp Cloud both consist in bridging the device connectivity platform to IoT Hub, representing each of the devices in the field as a unique device in IoT Hub.

All it takes to enable the integration is to grant access for your IoT Hub instance to Particle Cloud or Electric Imp Cloud which will take care of associating each of the devices it knows with a corresponding device ID in IoT Hub, creating, updating and deleting the IoT Hub device identities for you. When the data arrives in IoT Hub, it is no different than if devices had been connected directly. The new devices can seamlessly be integrated into an existing or new IoT solution.

New business models enabled

Not having to spend valuable time and resources on areas that are not in their domain of expertise (hardware and cloud development), companies like Kelly Roofing can extend their businesses to new models in record time.

Microsoft Dynamics is working with PowerObjects and Kelly Roofing to run a pilot which utilizes the Particle/IoT Hub Integration. By outfitting a roof with leak sensors connected to Azure through Particle, Kelly Roofing can move away from the traditional model of selling customers a roof every 20 years to instead offering customers a leak-proof roof for a yearly fee. This connected roof sends sensor data to Azure from Particle devices. If a leak is detected, a service alert is triggered in Dynamics and a contractor is automatically dispatched to service the roof. This reduces the upfront cost to the consumer while increasing their loyalty, satisfaction and lifetime value. It illustrates end to end the value this integration brings:

• Particle Electrons for Connectivity
• Particle Cloud for Device Management and Over-the-air firmware updates
• Azure IoT Hub as an entrance point for the data
• Azure Machine Learning and Power BI for anomaly detection
• Dynamics to trigger service alerts and schedule technicians

Electric Imp offers an “All-Azure” solution to Industrial IoT

In addition to providing an advanced integration that virtually eliminates the complexities of deploying, commissioning, securing, and managing IoT devices at scale, Electric Imp also offers customers the option of a private managed Electric Imp Cloud instance, fully hosted on Microsoft Azure. This gives customers further control for deployment-specific data privacy, scalability, and flexibility across all their Cloud resources.

Start playing with devices and Azure IoT Hub today!

You can get started in minutes following the step by step guides:

• QuickStart your impCloud-to-Azure IoT Hub integration
• Setup the Particle cloud to connect to Azure IoT Hub

Once you have securely connected your device to Azure, you can rapidly implement common IoT solution patterns:

• Save IoT Hub messages to Azure data storage
• Use Power BI to visualize real-time sensor data from Azure IoT Hub
• Use Azure Web Apps to visualize real-time sensor data from Azure IoT Hub
• Weather forecast using the sensor data from your IoT hub in Azure Machine Learning
• Device management with iothub-explorer
• Remote monitoring and notifications with Logic Apps