Siemens and Microsoft Unite to Revolutionize Building IoT Data Access Through Open Interoperability

🌐 Siemens and Microsoft Form Partnership for Enhanced Building IoT Interoperability

Siemens Smart Infrastructure and Microsoft have announced a significant partnership in an effort to revolutionize access to Internet of Things (IoT) data in buildings.
The partnership is set to enable seamless interoperability between Siemens' digital building platform, Building X, and Microsoft Azure IoT Operations, which is powered by Azure Arc.
The innovation is anticipated to release unmatched efficiency and sustainability in building operations.

📊 A New Era of Data Accessibility

This industry-changing partnership is engineered to drastically cut down on the intricacies that traditionally come with uniting multifarious IoT systems.
Through enabling Building X and Azure IoT Operations to communicate with each other flawlessly, the companies are expecting to slice integration efforts by a margin of 80%.
This effort reduction by such a monumental margin will have direct consequences in streamlining building operations and greatly enhancing sustainability efforts.
Additionally, this enhanced interoperability will make valuable IoT-based data far more accessible to major enterprise customers across a variety of industries, including commercial buildings, data centers, and university campuses.
This readily available data will allow organizations to make data-informed decisions, ultimately powering sustainability and operational efficiency.

🔄 Simpler Data Exchange and Customization

The solution will simplify the process of getting key datapoints, such as temperature, pressure, and indoor air quality, to the cloud.
This includes data from key assets like heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems, valves, and actuators.
Customers will benefit from single-click device onboarding to the cloud and very efficient data exchange, granting them unprecedented flexibility in the design of their IoT architecture.
This enables Siemens' hardware and software components to be integrated easily, freeing customers from the lock-in of a single vendor ecosystem.
What's more, this powerful integration will even enable customers to develop their own in-house use cases, such as energy monitoring and space optimization, tailoring the technology to their specific needs.

📖 Championing Open Standards

One of the more significant aspects of this partnership is that it's based squarely on widely adopted open industry standards.
The partnership leverages the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web of Things (WoT), which standardizes the hardware and software metadata and interfaces, and Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture (OPC UA) for the secure communication of data to the cloud.
Siemens and Microsoft are both active members of the W3C and the OPC Foundation, organizations that develop standards and guidelines to guarantee accessibility, interoperability, privacy, and security in the industry.
This commitment to open standards brings this solution to one of the first integrations of IoT data purely on the basis of open standards across multiple providers, setting a new industry standard.

🔍 Driving Transparency and Optimization

Susanne Seitz, CEO of Siemens Smart Infrastructure Buildings, emphasized the shared vision behind this partnership, which is to enable customers to realize the complete potential of IoT through the support of open standards and interoperability.
She highlighted that the increased access to data will provide portfolio managers with in-depth information on important key performance indicators like energy consumption and efficiency.
Given the prevalence of siloed IoT data, this level of transparency is a significant leap forward for an industry that is striving to optimize building operations and achieve aggressive sustainability targets.
Erich Barnstedt, Senior Director and Architect, Corporate Standards Group at Microsoft, shared a similar sentiment, citing Microsoft's commitment to engagement with industry leaders to offer customers greater choice and control of their IoT solutions.

🗓️ Availability and Platform Integration

Customers can expect the interoperability of Siemens' Building X and Azure IoT Operations to be in the market starting the second half of 2025.
Siemens' digital building platform, Building X, is designed to help customers digitalize, operate, and optimize their building operations, paving the way towards sustainable, autonomous, and profitable assets.
It is a central element of Siemens Xcelerator, an open digital business platform that allows customers to accelerate their digital transformation with greater ease, speed, and scale.