BMW Connected seamless digital future built on Azure

This week at Microsoft BUILD 2016, BMW presented their vision for the future of smart, connected cars. Their vision has been built on Azure. This is the future of BMW Connected, and it's made to create a smart car experience that integrates seamlessly with your smartphone, your contacts, your calendar, and every other part of your cloud-connected life. "The car will become the ultimate device, perfectly integrated into your digital lifestyle."

Inside this BMW Connected network of features and services, you'll find HD Insight for machine learning, App Service (with .NET, Java, and nodes) Microservices, and both AngularJS and HTML 5 technologies for the web. Your vehicle will be working with a Notification Hub for messaging, and both Application Insights and Power BI as powerful analytical tools.

What's that all mean?

It means that your future BMW vehicle is going to be smart – not just able to play music and navigate around your city, but smart enough to make suggestions to you. Heavy traffic?

Your vehicle might suggest you take the next offramp and try residential roads to bypass a jam. Running late? This system has the ability to send an email or message to your colleagues at work to let them know.

All of this will be added to users' already-active abilities to unlock and lock their vehicle remotely – flash headlights and sound their horn, as well.

All of this – a lot of this, I should say, if not all of it – will be available in the BMW Connected app for iOS in the very near future. This app will be available today in the iTunes app store.