Microsoft outlines innovations at Computex 2019
With Computex 2019 in full Swing, Microsoft hasn't held anything back about its latest innovations, technologies, and partnerships.
The company discussed everything from modern Windows PCs, connected devices, and internet-of-things (IoT) services at the event this year.
Microsoft CVP of consumer and device sales, Nick Parker, says the company continues to work closely with its partners to develop 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," he says.
Microsoft powers intelligent edge and IoT
Microsoft shared new services and programs that hardware manufacturers can use to connect devices to IoT solutions. They include IoT Plug and Play, Microsoft Azure IoT Device Agent V2 for Windows 10 IoT, and Azure IoT Central.
"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," says Parker.
IoT Plug and Play is a new open modelling 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 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, initialisation, 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.
Microsoft partners deliver modern PC experiences
Partners including Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo and MSI have recently announced new modern PCs suited for creators and gamers.
Microsoft says that 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.
Product highlights include Acer's ConceptD 500, the Asus ZenBook Pro Duo, the Dell XPS 13 2-in-1, the HP Omen X 2S, the Lenovo ThinkPad T495, and the MSI GE65 Raider.
"Microsoft is investing to enable modern OS experiences that take advantage of silicon advancements, powerful PCs, the cloud and the power of AI," says Parker.
"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 lets users mirror their Android phone screen on their PC, are new innovations users can expect in the coming months.
