Microsoft Corporation says its new "Microsoft Azure Intelligent Systems Service" will manage not only Windows-based devices, but devices running other operating systems as well.

This expansion of reach into the bits comprising the Internet of Things or IoT confirms Microsoft's bid to dominate this space just as it does in the productivity software sector with its MS Office.

Like Us on Facebook

Microsoft said Azure will help customers further understand and embrace the IoT and securely connect to, manage and capture machine-generated data from sensors and devices, regardless of the operating system being used.

Microsoft's embedded business is now known as its Internet of Things (IoT) team. This team will lead Microsoft's drive to enable Azure to manage IoT devices.

Microsoft began its push to dominate the IoT by announcing that the Windows operating system for the IoT will be made available for free. Smartphones installed with the Microsoft Phone OS and tablets less than nine inches in size will be the first beneficiaries of the giveaway.

This decision is aimed at ensuring that Windows dominates the IoT. The Windows on Devices website noted that Microsoft will release a software development kit later this spring that will let developers easily build smart machines that "talk" to each other.

The IoT is a concept first conceived in the 1990s in which things, animals and people are provided with unique identifiers and the ability to automatically transfer data over a network without requiring human-to-human or human-to-computer intervention.

Microsoft said its Azure service provides agents and open-source agent software to support multiple operating systems and protocols across line of business assets.

The result, Microsoft said, is a much comprehensive and faster solution to yield enterprise value. It also features Microsoft-developed and supported enterprise-level security.

Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, said Microsoft's plan to try to harness data generated by the growing number of smart devices comprising the IoT and making sense of it involves using a data platform or an ambient intelligence platform.

He said one end of this platform will contain MSOffice applications while the other will consist of the Microsoft SQL Server (a relational database management system) and Hadoop, an open-source software framework for storage and large-scale processing of data-sets on clusters of commodity hardware.