Microsoft;s Startup Business Accelerator (the people who brought you the Microsoft Vine public-information services) are introducing a different new company on June 24. That providing,
Microsoft Office 2010 Pro, known officially as Hohm and which which handles home-energy management, looks like but an additional generic Internet 2.0-type support.But Hohm is extra than an attempt by Microsoft to determine its cred inside the “save the planet” movement. Recently, I had a chance to ask Troy Batterberry, the Hohm product manager, about the service. After talking to him, here are five reasons I think Hohm is extra than initially meets the green eye:1. Hohm is a hosted serice running on Azure, Microsoft;s cloud platform. There are relatively few Microsoft solutions that already are running fully on top of Azure. HealthVault is a single; Live Mesh is one more. The calculations upon which the Hohm support is built are “really complicated,” Batterberry said, and require historical modeling. By running on Azure, Hohm can be scaled up or down, depending on demand, to use lots of compute cycles during peak demand.two. Speakng of HealthVault, Hohm was patterned after it and uses the same security and privacy mechanisms that Microsoft;s health-information service uses. While power consumption data doesn;t seem as in need of guarding that patient health data is,
Office Standard 2007 Key, energy usage and pricing are facts that is sensitive and to which access needs to become controlled, said Batterberry.3. Hohm is a single of Microsoft;s first — but not only — product tailored to the energy market. (The Dynamics team already launched an energy-management dashboard product last year, making it Microsoft;s first energy-specific “product.”) Remember how Microsoft began hiring doctors and healthcare experts — and even bought a healthcare-specific organization — in order to build and field HealthVault and Azyxxi? The corporation is planning a similarly serious foray into the energy field,
Office Pro Plus 2010 Key, building out further energy-centric software products and solutions, Batterberry said.4. Is Microsoft working on an energy-centric search capability/engine, the same way that Microsoft has incorporated health-specific search data into Bing? “It could make sense to go into the decision-specific power area,” Batterberry said.5. Microsoft considers Hohm part of a “10-year (investment) journey” into the power market. Microsoft;s energy-specific focus will encompass consumers, utility companies, device makers and more, Batterberry said. Microsoft may end up fielding some kind of enerprise-focused energy-management product/service, he said. The corporation may become a player inside the energy-centric device-control space (not a big stretch,
Microsoft Office 2007 Product Key, given Microsoft;s work in embedded operating systems with Windows Embedded Compact).Users (inside the U.S. only for now) interested in test-driving Hohm — which was codenamed “Niagara,
Microsoft Office 2007 Standard,” as the energy pioneer Nikola Tesla did a whole lot of his research in Niagara Falls — will be able to sign up for the beta this week on the Hohm page. Microsoft is expecting the final version of the services to be released in about six to nine months, Batterberry said.