Microsoft Azure IoT Central vs. Watson IoT Platform

Microsoft Azure IoT Central has native integrations with Visual Studio (like pretty much all Microsoft products) making it pretty simple to publish apps to Azure App Service, where you can host all sorts of different applications. It does a really good job of storing large amounts of data (for instance, collected from IoT devices with various sensors) and it gets stored to multiple DBs. Azure IoT Central could improve by adding more customizations, as this would make troubleshooting the products easier and make future costs smaller and easier to predict.

Incentivized

For large companies with large-scale manufacturing, electronics management, and infrastructures that require lots of maintenance, IBM Watson IoT is a must-have. It greatly increases performance, decreases downtime, and is an all-around great management dashboard. This is best for infrastructures that have a larger infrastructures of IoT devices in an enterprise/manufacturing setting, otherwise IBM Watson may not bring many benefits to your team.

Incentivized

• Documentation
• Support
• Good and approachable GUI
• Many types of subscription configurations

Incentivized

• The asset information is available in both static and dynamic format (from thermal images, to OEM data, to time series data). The ability to ingest all the information using a single platform has great value.
• Another benefit is a seamless integration with Maximo. This has been a challenge with other 3rd party systems available.
• The experience of IBM Maximo systems updates is positive.

Incentivized

• central application
• smartphone app

Incentivized

• Some of the tutorials could use a little more improvement - While there is a considerable amount of documentation, most of the good documentation for Watson IoT we found to be from third-parties.
• Administration and billing tools could use a bit more improvement - The UI is a bit clunky and poorly-designed here.
• Be prepared to work with IBM support to get this going - Their turn-around support for inquiries can be lengthy, and setup time may also be quite lengthy because of this.

Incentivized

Before deciding to go with Microsoft Azure IoT Central, we considered Google, Datadog, and AWS alternatives. The reason we went with Azure was that the client was heavily invested in Microsoft technologies and Azure plays really well with other Microsoft products. The competitive products might be a little bit easier to set up, with more flexible pricing, but, the integrations with other Microsoft services were the deciding factor for our use case.

Incentivized

Predix has recently launched their Asset Performance management Unified system. I am keen to see how it stacks up against Watson.

Incentivized

• positive: connected huge number of machines as IoT devices and passed them through entire IoT pipeline until storage in a fairly short time
• negative: we spent some time figuring out some "less-used" services because they aren't documented well

Incentivized

• Positive - This tool greatly increases most company's manufacturing and production efficiency, and the use-cases are extensive. It was a great way of decreasing down-time for us.
• Negative - Took lots of work and energy to get up and running, we had to rely on IBM support and tutorials many times during this process.
• Positive - Quite cheap, most of the tiers of pricing cost very little, and it's possible to use Watson IoT for a few months for free to see if it is beneficial for your company.

Incentivized