Microsoft partners with TomTom to take on HERE and AWS partnership (updated)

Back in 2016, TomTom first announced a partnership with Microsoft to bring enterprise-grade location-based services to Azure, based on TomTom’s maps, traffic and navigation software. Last year, Amazon AWS and HERE location platform announced a major partnership to offer developers access to an array of location services.

Today, Microsoft announced an expanded partnership with TomTom to bring TomTom’s maps and traffic data across Microsoft’s cloud services. As part of this partnership, TomTom will be a leading location data provider for Microsoft Azure and Bing Maps and Microsoft Azure will become TomTom’s preferred cloud provider. We have seen complaints from customers in the past that Microsoft’s mapping solutions doesn’t offer latest imagery. With this partnership, the issue will be resolved as TomTom will be providing the freshest map and traffic information.

“This deep partnership with TomTom is very different from anything Microsoft has done in maps before,” said Tara Prakriya, Partner Group Program Manager of Azure Maps and Connected Vehicles. “TomTom hosting their services in the Azure cloud brings with it their graph of map data. Manufacturing maps in Azure reduces the latency to customer applications, ensuring we offer the freshest data through Azure Maps. Azure customers across industries end up winning when their geospatial data and analytics, TomTom data, and Azure Maps services are all running together in the same cloud.”

You can learn more about this partnership from the link below.

Source: Microsoft

Update:

In response to the above story, HERE team spoke to us and clarified few things. First of all, Microsoft remains a longtime customer and strategic partner of HERE. Bing Maps and the positioning services for both Bing and Azure Maps still uses HERE location services. And most importantly, Microsoft and TomTom agreement is not an exclusive agreement. HERE and Microsoft will continue bringing joint innovative services to market for customers.