Microsoft's Azure makes its way to ABB's electric vehicle charging stations

The dilemma for someone considering a switch from a traditionally gasoline-powered vehicle to a hybrid or purely electric vehicle (EV)  spans far beyond the initial purchase price. Part of the inherent problem with electric cars is the sparsely populated public EV charging stations found around the world. Unlike, the mostly ubiquitous gasoline station pumping traditional fossil fuels, there are only 106,000 EV charging stations around the world. Furthermore, there are more than 1 million EV’s on the road to date, and industry projections have that number growing in the coming years.
Although the numbers are low for physical EV stations, the global revenue from EV charging stations is expected to increase going from 152.6 million last year to $2.9 billion by 2023. The revenue projections come courtesy of Navigant Research.
In this growing industry, some EV charging station companies are looking to capture that revenue growth with new products, improved scalability while also reducing their maintenance costs at the same time.

ABB Group, an EV charging station company recently partnered with Microsoft to launch a new electric vehicle fast-charging service platform. The ABB Group of companies operates with 140,000 employees in over 100 countries worldwide. With the help of Microsoft’s Azure cloud-based platform and services, ABB’s EV fast-charging stations will benefit from global scalability and advanced management features for ABB customers. The result for ABB is more advanced charging stations for the predicted influx of new EV drivers of the future.
According to Microsoft:

With the rapid pace of innovation these days, platform performance and stability can be key differentiators. Microsoft believes that moving to the cloud offers not only the necessary performance and stability but also the ability to scale — as big and as quickly as needed. This flexibility, combined with stability and security features, is a game-changer for the world’s automotive markets.”

ABB and Microsoft showed off the new EV charging service platform last week at eCarTec in Munich.