Samsung & Microsoft Alliance for Real Estate Solutions

Samsung Electronics Co. and Microsoft Corp. announced a global collaboration focused on digitally transforming the real estate development and property management industries. This collaboration, combining smart appliances and digital cloud technologies, aims at helping to drive improved building operations and maintenance, along with creating better experiences for both service technicians and residents. This new strategic alliance, with pilots currently under development, brings together the power of Microsoft's Azure IoT platform and productivity cloud services with Samsung's smart devices and SmartThings platform, to help optimize building operations, equipment maintenance, energy management, asset performance, and new tenant experiences for commercial, hospitality and residential buildings as well as mixed-use developments. The collaboration will leverage data from Samsung's range of smart refrigerators, washing machines, vacuums, air purifiers, ovens and other devices connected through the intelligent SmartThings platform. Such data integration allows building operators to monitor nearly all devices in real time, identify issues and take appropriate measures before real damage happens, should a problem occur. Microsoft's Azure IoT platform is able to process data messaging from millions of building sensors and devices and then use machine learning and AI to help building managers and operators determine what issues should be addressed in what order, and then link to Dynamics 365 Field Service to determine who is the right person, with the right skills, in the right location to resolve the issue.