Businesses from small startups to large companies and entrepreneurs look set to save significant amounts of time and money when Microsoft’s state of the art IoT & AI Insider Lab launches in April.
Following the success of existing labs in the US and China, the new Munich-based lab will be perfectly placed to connect with every major tech hub and capital in EMEA.
Microsoft’s IoT and AI Insider Labs enable users to bring their early stage projects or solutions to an environment which allows rapid design, prototyping, and testing, with a team of dedicated Microsoft experts on hand every step of the way to provide guidance and assistance.
Specced to impress
As with its counterparts, the new Munich lab will offer 24/7 secure on-site access to users, and will be split up into separate, functional sections, including private office space for four customer groups for idea generation, designing, and problem solving in privacy.
Before the customer sets foot in the lab, the IoT & AI Insider Lab engineers confer with the customer to understand their goals, their problems, and their architecture. By the time the customer arrives, the Lab team has built a sprint plan with them so that every moment in the lab is highly productive. Typically, customers feel that every week in the lab is equivalent to 1.5 to 2 months of time on their own.
Customers get hands-on engineering help with designing PCBs and creating enclosures. In-house Electrical engineers, Electronic & Mechanical CAD, Pick & Place and reflow ovens mean that customers can try their boards, make changes and rebuild in hours instead of weeks.
Embedded engineers in the lab help customers to build drivers to help them interface with the latest sensors, to securely connect and to transmit to Azure. Experience cloud engineers show customers how to build customized dashboards. Finally, Machine Learning / AI developers show customers how to spot anomalous devices and predict failures.
One such partner is Cisco – the company’s IoT portfolio will be available in Microsoft’s lab to help users build innovative enterprise-class IoT solutions:
Vikas Butaney, General Manager, Cisco IoT Connectivity:
“Customers can get a first-hand experience of the combined power of Cisco IoT and Microsoft Azure IoT platform to develop innovative use cases in the IoT Insider lab. Customers can now securely connect devices, use intelligence at the edge and with Azure IoT achieve their business outcomes.”
Another partner, OPC Foundation, has also worked closely with the Insider Lab to bring its technology to customers:
“Microsoft’s Insider Lab in Munich provides customers with various technologies and technical experience to help connect and digitize their businesses. Microsoft is the strongest open source contributor for OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA), which enables industrial compatibility. Microsoft’s open source integration of the OPC UA code with Microsoft Azure IoT allows companies to bring millions of devices and apps to the public cloud and manage them with one single application – regardless of what operating system they’re running.” – Stefan Hoppe, Vice President OPC Foundation
