Scott Udell (pictured), vice president of IoT solutions at Boston-based Cloud Technology Partners, after Microsoft released its Azure IoT Edge service, pushing the vendor into the industrial market to compete with manufacturing powerhouse General Electric.

"The rationale is certainly consistent with other vendors such as GE, Siemens and AWS, and is a recognition that for many real-time analytic use cases in the real and physical world, analytics, logic and processing need to be as close to the action — and the data — as possible."