A new player has joined the Microsoft Azure Certified for Internet of Things (IoT) partner ecosystem: Mentor, a subsidiary of Siemens that provides embedded systems for IoT. By teaming up with Microsoft, Mentor hopes to enable IoT customers to reduce time to market and simplify the development of IoT solutions.
Mentor’s contributions to Azure Certified for IoT include its Nucleus Real-Time Operating System (RTOS) and the Mentor Embedded Linux development platform. Nucleus is an RTOS that Mentor claims is deployed in over 3 billion devices, in industries ranging from automotive to medical to consumer electronics. The Mentor Embedded Linux platform is a commercial adaptation of the open-source Yocto Project, an undertaking by the Linux Foundation to develop Linux-based systems for embedded products.
Now that Mentor is Azure Certified for IoT, the Nucleus RTOS and Mentor Embedded Linux platform will be integrated with Azure’s software development kit (SDK). This integration will allow users to implement Azure’s IoT functionality while having full access to embedded system data, including CPU usage, power management status and memory availability. Together, these products will allow for sophisticated data analytics.
“Microsoft Azure Certified for IoT validates Mentor’s ability to jump-start customers’ IoT projects with pretested device and operating system combinations, and the ability to meet requirements with Linux, Nucleus RTOS or complex combinations of runtime environments,” said Mentor’s Scot Morrison. “Leveraging Mentor’s 20-plus years’ experience in embedded systems, our customers can benefit from a commercial-grade integration of Microsoft Azure with their embedded IoT projects, and have assurance for compatibility now and in the future.”
A lot of IoT solution providers are seeing the value of integrating their products with major IoT platforms, such as Microsoft’s Azure Certified for IoT, PTC’s ThingWorx partner ecosystem, or IBM’s Watson IoT ecosystem. Partnerships of this form not only offer extended functionality of IoT solutions, but also provide increased appeal to customers on the lookout for simple, hassle-free workflows.