Microsoft Outlines Innovation and Opportunities on the Intelligent Edge at Computex 2019

Microsoft has recently discussed how new modern Windows PCs, connected devices and IoT services and programs at Computex 2019.

“We continue to work closely with our partners to deliver intelligent edge solutions that enhance work and life experiences. The breadth of new PCs, IoT devices and IoT solutions on display at Computex, along with future ecosystem innovations will drive growth and business transformation for partners and customers,” said Nick Parker, CVP, Consumer and Device Sales, Microsoft

Partners are Delivering Modern PC Experiences

Partners including Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and MSI have recently announced new modern PCs that will delight both creators and gamers.

These new modern PCs from ecosystem partners require a modern operating system that enables foundational experiences customers already expect from their devices, including seamless updates, security that protects users from malicious attacks, anywhere connectivity with 5G, LTE and Wi-Fi that is consistent and reliable over time. Beyond that, the modern OS must deliver innovative new human-centric experiences including cloud connectivity that enables seamless access to data and compute power, rich AI-powered applications, and experiences, multi-sense capabilities - people can interact using touch, pen, voice, mouse and keyboard - and  the right sensor support and posture awareness to enable a breadth of new form factors and applications.

“Microsoft is investing to enable modern OS experiences that take advantage of silicon advancements, powerful PCs, the cloud and the power of AI. Some of these innovations, including Asian Inking platform, cognitive recognition services that help with photo tagging, as well as the new Your Phone capabilities that let users mirror their Android phone screen on their PC, are new innovations users can expect in the coming months,” said Nick Parker, CVP, Consumer and Device Sales, Microsoft

Powering Intelligent Edge and Internet of Things (IoT)

At Computex, Microsoft also shared new services and programs that hardware manufacturers can leverage to get their devices connected and included in IoT solutions:

• IoT Plug and Play is a new open modeling language to connect IoT devices to the cloud seamlessly, helping device partners to deploy IoT solutions at scale. This provides partners a straightforward way to model the capabilities and data coming from their IoT devices and will provide customers with a large portfolio of partner-certified devices that can easily be made to work with any IoT solution, often without writing any new code.
• Microsoft Azure IoT Device Agent V2 for Windows 10 IoT lets operators configure, monitor and manage their devices remotely from their Azure dashboard. It provides an open-source, ready to build the package that creates and manages the Azure IoT Hub identities on the device, manages the cloud connection and its renewal, provides a plug-in model for platform components, which allows easy onboarding to various Azure services, including discovery, initialization, error reporting, and state aggregation. It also comes with a set of ready-to-ship plug-ins for commonly used platform components and leverages Azure IoT Module twin so a separate UWP app is not required to connect to Azure IoT Hub.
• Azure IoT Central is a fully managed global IoT SaaS (software-as-a-service) solution that makes it easy to connect, monitor, and manage IoT assets at scale. New custom dashboard features allow partners to bring their own brand and user experience to their IoT solution and benefit from the built-in security, reliability, device connectivity and role-based user account management provided by IoT Central.

Partners such as Techsun and Advantech are implementing IoT solutions built on Microsoft’s comprehensive, trusted and easy-to-use edge to cloud platforms to embrace business model transformation and accelerate time to value for customers.

“At Microsoft our goal is to simplify IoT – from the cloud down to the smallest microcontroller (MCU) based devices, and we do this by meeting our partners and customers where they are, with the right intelligent cloud services, software and dev tools, to get devices connected, and manage their solutions at scale,” Nick Parker, CVP, Consumer and Device Sales, Microsoft