5 years after joining the internet of things industry, Google is shutting down its IoT Core service, giving users a year to switch to one of its partners. The company reasons that its IoT customers will benefit more from the expertise of one of its Google Cloud partners — including industry stalwart Intel and startups like Sight Machine and ClearBlade. At the same time as Alphabet withdraws from the market, Microsoft — a leader in the IoT sector — is building its offerings and working to integrate them into Azure.
Microsoft itself leans on partnerships as part of its IoT and edge-computing strategies, but after a reorganization in 2022, the company is working to consolidate the two. It hopes to integrate these operations into existing products, such as Azure Arc (hybrid management services), Azure Stack (hyper-converged infrastructure products), and Azure Edge Zones (5G-connected cloud services). The company’s existing IoT/edge offerings include Azure Digital Twins, which utilizes spatial intelligence for modeling physical settings, as well as Azure IoT Edge, which provides edge-computing devices with enhanced analytics.
As Microsoft slowly grows its IoT services, with Google’s exit, it seems poised to fortify its strong position in the market.