Azure Partner Roundup: Agricultural tech; IoT; AI digital assistant

Bayer launches capabilities in connection with Microsoft Azure Data Manager for Agriculture, Aruba teams up with Microsoft to support IoT workloads, and SWARM Engineering premieres agricultural offering.

Bayer launches capabilities in connection with Microsoft Azure Data Manager for Agriculture

In conjunction with Microsoft’s announcement of Azure Data Manager for Agriculture, Bayer announced the availability of its AgPowered Services offering, based on Azure. Companies building internal or customer-facing agriculture technology can use core Data Manager for Agriculture capabilities with additional Bayer capabilities licensed on top.

Bayer develops AgPowered services models with publicly available data and plans to provide its Imagery Insights, Growing Degree Day Calculation, and Crop Water Use Maps offerings as part of AgPowered Services. These preexisting services do operations like tracking crop health with satellite imagery or assessing water input into fields.

“Only innovation can ensure global food security while protecting the planet. Modern agriculture and food production generate a tremendous amount of valuable data that can drive productivity and sustainability. However, this data is often disconnected, not useable throughout the value chain, and the costs to build digital solutions from scratch are high. Our new cloud-based solutions help overcome these challenges. Customers can use the infrastructure and capabilities to build their own digital solutions and products on top of the most robust collection of ag data in the world,” stated Dr. Robert Reiter, head of R&D for Bayer’s Crop Science Division.

Aruba teams up with Microsoft to support IoT workloads

Aruba, a division of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, is working with Microsoft and reelyActive to provide an open-source data connector for Azure that streams IoT device data through Aruba wifi access points for analysis in Power BI. For its part, reelyActive interoperates with Aruba IoT Transport for Azure to reformat data without the need for custom engineering.