TomTom co-founders answer questions about their expanded Microsoft partnership

A few weeks ago Microsoft announced new Azure Location Based Services, with the mapping data for the services being provided by TomTom. Today, the TomTom co-founders made an appearance on Microsoft’s Transform blog, discussing more on their expanded Microsoft partnership.

In the blog post, Peter Frans Pauwels talks about TomTom already having office infrastructure hosted by Microsoft, with real-time map data hosted on Azure. He remarks that the two companies share synergies.

We’ve got to be sure transportation is going to be safe, clean and enjoyable. Getting there will require a lot of work. The scale of Microsoft and its cloud — the security, safety, availability — those are really important to us to realize our vision, so we can scale up and make the technology we have today much more accessible to many more parties.

Anders Truelsen also mentions how TomTom and Microsoft both share a clear common goal and a very clear common strategy, with a lot of interests being shared between the two companies.

…Any enterprise customer or developer using Azure now has access to our products. You can combine connected devices, avoid traffic and accidents, search for the nearest restaurants, and make sure you have a route with a strong cellular connection the whole way…. There is a lot of common interest between the companies. We make our data more accessible than ever to a wide audience of users.

The two discuss many other topics, including how the partnership benefits consumers, how transit is becoming more personal, and the security challenges of big data. Feel free to check out the full interview here, and let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

Further reading: Azure, Microsoft, TomTom