Scott Udell (pictured), vice president of IoT solutions at Boston-based Cloud Technology Partners, after last week's unveiling of Microsoft Azure's IoT Edge service, which pushes the traditionally IT vendor into the industrial market to compete with manufacturing conglomerate General Electric through its new vital edge analytics capabilities.

"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."