NexTech AR Solutions Inc., an augmented reality technology 3D advertisement and e-commerce provider, today announced that Microsoft Azure Cloud Services platform will now be a standard offering for its users.

Augmented reality is used by many brands and outlets to attract customers using mobile devices by layering extra visual information over their vision in order to “augment” what they can see. For example, extra product information can be added to a box of cereal, or a guide path can show a tour group through a building.

Through the use of Azure Cloud, NexTech will be able to provide additional cloud-based scalability for hosting AR experiences for clients for their customers for virtual and hybrid events.

Events hosted by NexTech across the education, hospitality, health and professional services industries can be scaled more quickly and easily to accommodate 20 times the sizes the users with the integration of Azure.

“With our existing data center, making quick changes to event size and scale was an involved process that required hardware changes and sometimes took weeks,” said Mark Pace, chief technology officer of Virtual Experience Platform at NexTech. “By migrating our platforms onto Microsoft Azure, we can scale events at the cloud level, with the push of a button, enabling us to elevate our event and customer experiences simultaneously.”

According to a report from Markets and Markets, the augmented reality market is estimated to grow from $10.7 billion in 2019 to an estimated $72.7 billion by 2024. E-commerce in particular is driving a major focus for AR and retailers, advertisers and brands in China. Enterprise interests in AR also loom large in the coming years as companies continue to look for ways to allow employees to work remotely and more efficiently.

Azure cloud computing is already generally available in NexTech’s recently announced ARroom video streaming solution and will soon be available in the Virtual Experience Platform software-as-a-service offering for events and educational experiences in the coming months.

The company also plans to migrate data and projects from its AiRShow and ARitize apps to Azure, which will increase scalability for all NexTech customers across e-commerce, entertainment, education and enterprise services.

“Azure, Microsoft’s cloud and edge computing platform is the gold standard and positions us perfectly for large enterprise customers who are looking for a convenient and reliable cloud-based computing platform,” said Evan Gappelberg, chief executive of NexTech. “We see this as a major building block which is crucial to our business model as we look to expand the footprint of our virtual events and experiences.”

Image: NexTech