TomTom and Microsoft have announced a partnership that allows Azure to integrate TomTom’s location-based services into the Microsoft Azure platform. As a result of the partnership, developers using the Microsoft Azure platform enjoy enhanced access to location-based services that allow their applications to take advantage of TomTom’s mapping and navigation software. The partnership represents a coup for TomTom because it brings its technology to an expanded universe of developers via the Azure platform. Azure, meanwhile, benefits from the enrichment to its platform delivered by TomTom’s technologies for facilitating enhanced navigation, delivering geo-spatial business intelligence and tracking the location of objects or its devices. Microsoft’s collaborations with TomTom underscores the depth of its interest in geo-spatial technologies as further evinced by the extension of its partnership with HERE and its relationship with Esri, a geographic information systems technology vendor that runs on the Azure platform. As such, Microsoft’s partnership with TomTom indicates its interest in continuing its courtship of the enterprise by bolstering the location-based technology and services available on Azure and subsequently creating an infrastructure for internet of things analytics from data delivered by sensors traversing the globe.
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