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Leverage Azure Functionality with the new Azure Connector for ThingWorx Flow!

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We’re back with a ThingWorx 8.5 highlight! Today, we’ll cover brand-new functionality within ThingWorx Flow—the Azure Connector!

 

Imagine you’re on the regal shores of ThingWorx, trying to reach the plentiful utopia of Azure IoT services and capabilities. How do you get there? Through the new Azure Connector for ThingWorx Flow!

 

The Azure Connector for ThingWorx Flow is an OOTB connector that enables you to leverage the power and breadth of Azure services directly in ThingWorx applications with ThingWorx Flow. If you have intermittent needs for high-scale processing, for example, the Azure connector can help optimize costs based on when you require a mighty powerful liege and where you only pay for the necessary processing capacity when it is important. Azure Functions are also useful when you want to leverage some special code that was written in a language like Python that you’d like to easily leverage, such as to pre-process information collected from a device.

 

With the Azure connector, you’re able to:

  • Support execution of logic apps to access a large number of OOTB systems connectors and customer investments in apps.
  • Enable execution of Azure functions wherever elastic scale is needed to cost-effectively support use cases that have intermittent high-scale needs, such as executing an analysis of device sensors leading up to and following a key alert or incident.
  • Enable use of Azure Cognitive Services to easily leverage a rich set of capabilities from simple text to voice or voice to text to computer vision in end-to-end IoT use cases. A few examples include the ability to:
    • Convert the alert text to speech to deliver to an operator to take urgent action.
    • Convert a verbal description of an assembly problem to a textual description in an automatically generated problem report.
    • Use computer vision for a quality check to automatically pass or fail a part based on a visual image and confidence level.

Here are a few of the many different services you can leverage with the Azure Connector in ThingWorx Flow:

  • Anomaly Detector
  • Bing Search
  • Computer Vision
  • Custom Vision
  • Execute Function
  • Execute Logic App
  • Face Recognition
  • LUIS Prediction
  • QnA Prediction
  • Speaker Recognition
  • Speech Service
  • Text Analytics

Check out this demo video to see an example in action. In the video, you’ll see us:

  • Create an Azure Function app.
  • Create a ThingWorx Flow that triggers from an alert on a ThingWorx thing.
  • Within the flow, you’ll see us consume the alert information and send it to the Azure Function app, and the Azure function app will process and return a response.

 

While simple, this demo shows the ability to connect ThingWorx and Azure together for an incredibly flexible and powerful distributed IoT system.

 

Finally, if you’re looking for assistance on how to use the new connector, see our Help Center here.

 

Stay connected and go with the (ThingWorx) Flow!

Kaya

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