TomTom & Microsoft Corp. today announced that they were expanding their partnership, bringing TomTom’s maps & traffic data into a multitude of mapping scenarios across Microsoft’s Cloud services.
Azure Maps delivers secured location APIs to provide geospatial context to data. The Azure Maps service enhances the value of the Microsoft Azure Cloud platform that is helping enterprises and developers create IoT, mobility, logistics and asset tracking solutions. TomTom Microsoft partnership will mean the former providing their map data and services as a “significant component” for completing these enterprise customer scenarios.
Anders Truelsen, Managing Director, TomTom Enterprise said in a written statement, “We’re excited to be chosen as the location data provider to power mapping services across all of Microsoft, including Bing, Cortana, Windows & many other leading products and the innovations that will come forward in this continued relationship.”
“This deep partnership with TomTom is very different from anything Microsoft has done in maps before,” said Tara Prakriya, Partner Group Program Manager of Azure Maps & Connected Vehicles. “TomTom hosting their services in the Azure Cloud brings with it their graph of map data. Manufacturing maps in Azure reduces the latency to customer applications, ensuring we offer the freshest data through Azure Maps. Azure customers across industries end up winning when their geospatial data and analytics, TomTom data, and Azure Maps services are all running together in the same cloud.”
Azure Maps lights up a multitude of location scenarios for Microsoft, said the press note. Azure customers now have native support ranging from building map-based dashboards to visualize Internet of Things (IoT) spatial analytics to mobility scenarios for vehicle movement.
Here’s an example: in agriculture, customers can easily track utilisation of farm sensors for crops, livestock, tractors & more to optimize production.
What’s more, claimed the company, TomTom providing the freshest map & traffic information in combination with Azure Maps services & SDKs “would help perpetuate improved smart city applications.” Azure Maps SDKs using TomTom services make it simple to render a multitude of data sets from a variety of sources – such as real-time parking meter rates, street-specific traffic, addressing carbon footprint, reducing noise pollution and more in a consolidated, map-based application for visualization of pertinent city information crucial to its citizens.
Image Credit: TomTom
