Advantech Bolsters Partnerships to Further AIoT and Edge Computing

February 05, 2024

Blog

At the recent Advantech World Partner Conference, the company made a serious focus on two key themes:

• Edge evolution, which is all about shaping the future of embedded and emerging businesses;
• Working with partners, with solutions from Edge to Cloud.

To achieve those goals, a wide range of topics needed to be covered, including embedded IoT (and IIoT) platforms, Edge computing and Edge AI platforms, and the company’s Edge+ software and industrial peripheral module solutions and services.

Going forward, Advantech plans to target what it calls “emerging application industries.” Such applications would include green energy, robotics and automated mobile robots (AMRs), the EV infrastructure, and mission-critical applications. As such, the company will partner with the likes of Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, Arm, NXP, Qualcomm, MediaTek, and Microsoft Azure Open AI.

At the same time, the company will continue down its stated path of implementing smart industry solutions such as healthcare, retail and hospitality, and logistics and fleet management. In each case, “smarts” are being added to the hardware and software solutions to enhance these applications, connecting them to the Internet for a true IIoT experience. In each case, the innovative solutions come from a collaboration with partners.

With experience that now borders on 40 years, Advantech has adopted a “sector-driven" approach that tightly aligns product creation with industry-specific needs, and at the same time, integrates 5G, AI, and Cloud technologies. The latest Edge computing and AI platform products are designed with Edge AI SDK, EdgeSync 360, DeviceOn AIoT device management, and IoT Security software solutions. With these offerings, users can customize their gateway solutions to fit the specific needs of their applications, as well as provide a roadmap to upgrades and future products.

As an example of Advantech’s commitment to the spaces described here, the company recently announced that its products are now available in the Microsoft Azure Certified Device catalog. This move ensures that Advantech’s customers will have an easy path to getting their IoT solutions up and running quickly with hardware and software that has been pre-tested and verified to work with Azure IoT services.

According to Advantech, “Microsoft’s Azure Certified Device program lets businesses reach customers where they are, working with an ecosystem of devices and platforms, allowing for faster time to production.”

When it comes to specific products, Advantech’s EI-52 edge intelligence system (pictured here) has achieved Microsoft’s “Azure Certified Device” and “Edge Managed” certifications, meaning that they are advanced devices that are capable of streamlining deployment, minimizing cost, and facilitating Edge computing and analytics. The validation ensures the products’ capability to connect to the Azure IoT Hub and establish secure provisioning using the Device Provisioning Service (DPS). This validation provides seamless interoperability.

The EI-52 is designed with an with Intel 11th generation Core i5/Celeron processor. With built-in Intel 12th Iris Xe graphics and Vector Neural Network Instructions (VNNI), users are assured high graphic performance and AI inference acceleration. The EI-52 supports HDMI+DP dual display, and offers 2x GbE, 6x USB, and 2x RS-232/422/485. On the software side, the EI-52 supports Advantech’s WISE-DeviceOn and Edge X data-acquisition API, which can fulfill diverse data-acquisition demands in a host of applications, such as self-service kiosk, smart city and factory automation.