Took their sweet time with this. But the migration of Microsoft Azure and Bing Maps to the location data provided by TomTom is now officially underway.
The two companies actually announced the expansion of their partnership more than a year back.
As part of this deal, Microsoft was to incorporate the company’s map and traffic data into various mapping scenarios across the cloud-based services of Azure and Bing. Essentially, the software titan was to use TomTom as its preferred provider of the base map data.
Well, we now have confirmation that the migration is has now well and truly underway.
The change starts today, and affects all regions with the exception of China, Japan, and South Korea.
Microsoft started the gradual rollout of the new TomTom base map data to Bing.com users and other first-party products in March 2020. Today, it is doing the same for the Bing Maps platform.
And over the coming months, all Bing Maps customers will be automatically migrated to the new data source. The Basic and Free accounts are now seeing this change, while Enterprise customers of the service will see this shift by the end of August.
The Azure Maps SDK already uses TomTom services, and can collect real-time data like parking meter rates and street-specific traffic.
All applications that use the Bing Maps API will continue to function normally — except for older versions of Windows 10 below version 1703.
In case you were curious, while the base map data source is changing, REST APIs and SDKs that are part of the Bing Maps platform will continue to work.
TomTom, a Dutch giant, is one of the largest developers and creators of location technology in the world. The Amsterdam based company competes with Garmin and HERE in their respective spaces.
