Smart city and technology facilitator TomTom has entered into a strategic alliance with tech giant Microsoft to bring the former’s map and traffic data into the latter’s cloud services. As per the terms of the deal, TomTom will become the preferred location data provider for Microsoft Azure, Cortana and Bing Maps. Also, as part of the broadened alliance, TomTom has selected Microsoft Azure as its preferred cloud provider.
According to TomTom, the Microsoft Azure platform empowers enterprises to create IoT, mobility, logistics and asset tracking solutions. They say these enterprises constantly need loaction-based services and applications to monitor the location of their devices to enrich customer experience scenarios.
By extending their partnership with Microsoft, TomTom believes that they will not only boost the experience of enterprise customers but also improve the quality of their location-based technologies. They say that Microsoft’s virtual assistant Cortana and location enabler Bing and will be integrated into their IoT and mobility offerings to provide end-to-end logistical solutions.
Tara Prakriya, Group Program Manager of Azure Maps and Connected Vehicles states that TomTom partnership will bring their map data directly onto the Azure platform which will reduce the latency to customer applications. She believes that integrating the map data with Azure Maps will allow customers to visualize IoT spatial analytics for vehicle detection.
Market analysts opine that the alliance with Microsoft will benefit TomTom in the long run, following the tech giant’s acquisition of CitiusData to boost their open source cloud database.