Internet of Things is the latest buzzword from the computing industry. Of course everything has to have an abbreviation and it’s, logically, is IoT. The short definition, as provided by wikipedia, is:

“… the interconnection of uniquely identifiable embedded computing devices within the existing Internet infrastructure.”

Microsoft’s marketing team has jumped on the buzzword, as is their job some might say, unfortunately, and integrated it into their cloud platform service, Azure. The result is a list of ‘Azure IoT services’. Let’s take a look at that list (as of 26/01/15 - http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/server-cloud/internet-of-things.aspx):

1. Event Hubs
Ah, here is the Internet Of Things – ‘Cloud-scale telemetry ingestion from websites, apps, and devices’

2. Intelligent Systems Service
‘makes it easier for enterprises to securely connect, manage, capture and transform machine-generated data from Line of Business (LoB) assets, such as industry devices and sensors, regardless of OS platform’ – that seems strongly IoT as well.        
3. Notification Hubs
‘Send push notifications to any platform, from any backend’ – this would seem on the face of it to tie in with 1.   

4. Stream Analytics
‘Real-time stream processing in the cloud. Stream Analytics is an event processing engine that helps uncover real-time insights from devices, sensors, infrastructure, applications and data.’

5. Machine Learning
Powerful cloud-based predictive analytics - mining historical data with computer systems to predict future trends or behavior. This one is of particular interest to me as my PhD was concerned with machine learning of medical data.

6. HDInsight
‘Our 100% Apache Hadoop-based service in the cloud’ Thus this is infrastructure support for specific open-source distributed computing software.

7. Machine Learning Studio
‘Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio is a collaborative visual development environment that enables you to build, test, and deploy predictive analytics solutions that operate on your data.’ You’d hope this was an IDE wrapper round the services provided by 5, but this was not immediately apparent.

8. Power BI for Office 365
‘Power BI is a cloud service that lets you share, collaborate and access your Excel reports anywhere on any device.’ These are provided out of the box with Office 365 so it would be interesting to see what additional functionality is provided by the ‘Power BI’.

Note that many of the services are currently still in preview and while most are accepting participants in the preview phase, some are not.

But it seems I was being disingenuous – several of the services do overlap significantly with the Internet of Things concept.