*JustMe* schreef op 26 november 2021 14:43:
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Azure Maps is natively integrated as a first party product of the Azure cloud. And so, when we talk about Azure, and all of the Azure wins, we are talking about location through Azure Maps. And so, as you start to see these wins announcements coming through Azure that include location and effectively Azure Maps, we are effectively talking about TomTom.
As Andrew’s mentioned, we struck this lucrative partnership that brings TomTom’s APIs to the Azure cloud, and we wrapped those up and made them a part of our platform.
As Azure grows, our location capabilities need to grow and keep up with our customer needs. And we want to make that simple for our Azure customers to use.
And the way that Azure works is you actually subscribe to a pre-committed amount of Azure and then you start spending against that commitment.And when companies start to look around over the one, two, three, five-year commitments and they see Maps there, it's a pretty easy decision because they've already pre-committed for amounts that they need to spend and so they just go to our portal and they start using Azure Maps.
We don't get pinned against Google Maps anymore. It's an Azure discussion. It’s higher level. And so, Azure Maps is the native location platform for Azure and the Azure ecosystem. We actually sit inside of Azure IOT organizationally and within Azure IoT there's a group called Azure IoT Mobility. Azure IoT Mobility is made up of the Microsoft connected vehicle platform and Azure Maps.
So that gets me to the second part of why Azure Maps was created and that was to power a direct vertical integration into the automotive space for the Microsoft connected vehicle platform.
And, last week, two weeks ago, ten days ago... We announced that TomTom’s native integration with their navigation kit would be part of the Microsoft connected vehicle platform. This is a significant move.
The connected vehicle platform brings edge computing into the vehicle.
Edge computing means it runs in the car. It can actually run AI in the vehicle. It can make decisions in the car and it’s trained by cloud computing. You get data, you put it in the cloud, you train it, you install modules in the car, and now things are happening in the car. We call it the automotive edge.
We've got a robust offering for Azure Maps and Azure customers. We've got maps and satellite imagery. The Maps are powered by TomTom. Every map TomTom has, I have coming through Azure Maps.
The SDKs. Our SDKs. We actually built these on open source. So, we took web SDKs and rolled them and we're pulling in TomTom services through the web SDKs so as Azure customers are taking Azure Maps SDKs, they're pulling through TomTom services. Routing, Anders covered this, didn't do it justice. There's so much complexity in the routing API that TomTom provides.
Shortest and fastest is the simple ones but also route optimisation. So, give me a bunch of points. Tell me the order in which I should go through them. The isochrones which is how far can I get in one minute from here, in five minutes from here, in all directions. It ends up creating a polygon. Electrical vehicle routing, all of the turn restrictions are included. There's a multitude of scenarios. In fact, I have a huge slide that has all of the routing capabilities: taxis, HOV lanes, vans, bike routing.
All of this is included in the routing API powered by TomTom. The search API is everything that TomTom has in their data corpus, I could search for it. Every address, every point of interest, business listing, every landmark available to Azure customers.
The spatial operations is a unique thing to Microsoft. We actually built this, and it includes our geo- fencing service. So, we're routing out the portfolio of offerings from TomTom with some additional capabilities. This gives us spatial analytics so that we can plug in different data sets and do analytics based on spatial information.
Anytime geography comes into play, we use TomTom. The traffic data, best in breed across the board, powered by TomTom. We get this as flow and incident data. We also get some measurements. So, if you're approaching the back of the line for any part of congestion, it will give you a measurement distance and time from where you are to the back of the line. Once you're in the line, we can actually calculate once you’re going to get out of the line as well. So, it's great insight for time management.
Mobility is actually an additional partnership we did with a company called Moovit out of Israel. So now you can see there's a partner ecosystem at play. And so, while TomTom brings these rich data and services, the freshest maps, Moovit does the same thing for transit mobility and so in fact our partnership has extended beyond and now the three of us are talking. And so, we actually announced earlier this year the first multi modal system that crossed both transit and road graphs. And so, a unique offering coming through Azure Maps.
And then data storage, if you wanted to store your data in the Azure Cloud and use it with Azure Maps, you can use it with the Azure Maps data storage.
I mentioned we can lean on enterprise agreements.
So, as customers are signing up for Azure, they have a menu of options that they can go choose. And Azure Maps is right there waiting for them. They can select it and start using it immediately. They don't have to talk to me, if you want you can just start using the service.
And so, it's been a big win inside of Microsoft. Our growth is significant. It's a 200% month over month in terms of customers for Azure Maps specifically and we only made it generally available at May of last year, and so the uptake has been significant. We're going to continue to grow. We're going to continue to innovate and I will continue to push requirements on TomTom to keep their engineering team on their toes as well.