For creating an ecosystem of smart location-based services, Microsoft is ready to partner with mapping companies. TomTom, Here, and Esri are the new partners of the Microsoft. Microsoft announced this partnership in this week at the Microsoft Technology Center in Detroit.  TomTom offers maps, traffic and navigation services to Microsoft. Microsoft will integrate enterprise-grade location-based services to Microsoft's Azure platform. This partnership offers to all companies the structure to build and manage enterprise, mobile, Web, and Internet of Things applications that are location aware

"Location is fast becoming a critical component of a broad range of applications and services. Teaming up with Microsoft will bring our technology to a much broader developer community on a platform they are already familiar with," said Harold Goddijn, TomTom CEO on the partnership with Microsoft.

Talking about the partnership, Ashish Pandya, Director of Corporate Strategy for Here said, "We are entering a new era of services around connected cars in terms of safety, in-car productivity and making journeys more efficient. We don't think one single entity can do this by itself. It's going to take a collaborative effort. We're very pleased to expand the agreement we've had with Microsoft."

Real time Geographic information system (GIS) technology company Esri, which is runs on Azure. It can ingest real-time location-based data including weather data, social media feeds, live sensor data and location services data from third-party companies including Here and TomTom.

"In the future, Microsoft wants to enable global location-based services for customers differentiated by an open platform, with large data sets and natively integrated functionality for developers, and deep integration with other data graphs for new scenarios. We envision a platform that gives our customers choices, with many options for customization and opportunities to power smart cities, IoT and industrial transformation, from manufacturing to retail to automotive," wrote Kevin Dallas, Microsoft Corporate Vice President of Business Development.

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