Today wraps up Hannover Messe 2021, one of the world’s leading industrial trade shows. This annual event attracts more than 200,000 visitors and highlights the latest in technology across six topic areas: Automation, Motion & Drive, Digital Ecosystems, Logistics, Energy Solutions, Engineered Parts & Solutions, and Future Hub. With over 6,500 exhibitors, and 1,400 events spread across five days, the show is an incredible opportunity to showcase our technology, learn from those in the industry and hear from our customers.
Due the on-going global pandemic, this year the trade show was hosted virtually and featured as “HM Digital Edition”. As much as the Microsoft team missed joining with our customers and partners in Germany to participate, the team was excited to still host virtual sessions showcasing several innovative solutions.
The IoT team walked customers through how to build more agile factories through the use of Industrial IoT, Cloud, AI and Mixed Reality solutions. The current challenge for many organizations is to create safer, more secure and agile "factories of the future." To provide insight into this transformation, we had our customers and partners talk about how they are scaling their solutions with the Microsoft cloud and edge platforms and describe their best practices as they prepare for the “new normal” across hundreds of factories worldwide.
We also had a joint session with McKinsey where we were able to share the learnings from work on the World Economic Forum's Global Lighthouse Network and the accelerating adoption of digital technologies in daily manufacturing and supply chain operations. Digital transformation as explored in these sessions is powered by the intelligent edge and intelligent cloud. These technologies can be quickly and easily integrated into your Windows IoT devices with our upcoming General Availability of Azure IoT Edge for Linux on Windows.
Azure IoT Edge for Linux on Windows, also often referred to as ‘EFLOW’, allows organizations to deploy production Linux-based cloud-native workloads on Windows IoT and retain existing Windows management assets at the edge. This opens a world of capabilities for commercial IoT as well as AI/ML with the availability of pre-built modules from the Azure Marketplace such as Live Video Analytics, SQL Edge, and OPC Publisher as a few examples. Customers can benefit from the power of Windows IoT for applications that require an interactive UX and high-performance hardware interaction without having to choose between Windows or Linux and leverage the best of Windows and Linux together.
A lot of customers want to deploy these Linux workloads but do not want to introduce a new operating system in their environment that they are unable to manage with existing infrastructure or expertise. To learn more about EFLOW, check out the following blog, video and documentation.
