Microsoft has joined the IoT M2M Council (IMC), a trade group that fosters a community of 25,000 qualified IoT users.

The Microsoft Azure IoT Engineering group will use the IMC as a platform to stay in closer contact with enterprise users and product makers that are deploying IoT technology. The IMC’s rank-and-file adopter membership covers 27 vertical markets of applications around the globe, from manufacturing to healthcare to retail point-of-sale and more.

A plurality of the IMC’s adopter members identify as operations, which seems to indicate they are not purely technologists, but rather business people with problems to solve. Interestingly, this demographic profile holds over almost all the vertical markets that the trade group tracks.

According to Microsoft’s own IoT Signals research report, over 90% of 3000 companies surveyed adopted IoT in 2020 and 80% have one project in the use-phase, both numbers up significantly. IMC will help members become aware of how they can solve real-world problems using Azure IoT services.

“We welcome Microsoft Azure IoT, as one of the most important IoT technology providers, to our group,” said Kim Bybjerg, IMC chairman and head of European operations for Tata Communications, “The IMC mission is to accelerate the adoption of IoT technology for the common good, and it’s pleasing to see such an influential company recognising our community as important to that end.”

Tony Shakib, partner general manager for Azure IoT, will sit on the IMC board of governors.

“We are excited to join IMC to strengthen customer ties and engage with partners across the IoT ecosystem where we can both learn from and contribute to the community for simplifying end-to-end IoT,” said Shakib. “Our goal is to work with IMC to accelerate the adoption of IoT.”

The IMC is the largest trade group dedicated to the global IoT and M2M sector with over 25,000 IoT enterprise users, product makers, designers and apps developers that buy IoT products and services as members.

Board member companies include 1NCE, Aeris, AVSystem, BeamLive, BICS, Blues Wireless, Digi International, FloLive, Fractus Antennas, Gurtam, iBasis, IoT Launch, Kore, Losant, Microsoft Azure IoT, MultiTech, NimbeLink, Pelion division of Arm, Pod Group, Quectel, Software AG, Somos, Taoglas, Tata Communications, Telit and Vodafone.