By Barb Edson, general manager, Marketing and Business Development for Windows Embedded
On the heels of our recent release of the Windows Embedded 8 platform, we’re making another member of the Windows Embedded family available today — Windows Embedded 8 Industry. David Wurster, Microsoft Windows Embedded’s senior product manager, has details on how Windows Embedded has evolved beyond point-of-service (POS) systems in retail to do much more in the Windows 8 era.
A couple of weeks ago, we announced the availability of Windows Embedded 8 Pro and Windows Embedded 8 Standard, bringing a modern OS with tons of capabilities to edge devices within intelligent systems.
Building on that announcement, today we’re making available Windows Embedded 8 Industry. The name reflects a broad scope of possibilities to further expand the Windows Embedded 8 family across a range of industries and targeted intelligent system scenarios.
When we began this journey years ago targeting retail POS devices with Windows Embedded POSReady, the Internet of Things and the concept of intelligent systems were still in their infancy. As we’ve seen the sophistication of intelligent systems evolve over the past few years, it’s become clear how many powerful opportunities exist beyond just retail — manufacturing, healthcare, transportation and more.
Windows Embedded 8 Industry provides a fixed-image OS that is especially suited to power industry devices, control panels, kiosks, and yes, POS terminals. It provides a single image with lockdown features and embedded enhancements that will make the next generation of industry devices smarter, better connected, more secure, and more user friendly.
Windows Embedded 8 Industry also provides app compatibility across devices, whether you’re building one from scratch or re-imaging existing ones with a modern OS with an intuitive user interface. It also makes Windows Embedded 8 Industry easy to deploy, and easy to manage.
And of course, because Windows Embedded 8 Industry is based on Windows 8, it also allows you to incorporate devices as full network citizens, and leverage the power of Microsoft technologies from the point of interaction all the way to the cloud.
With this release of Windows Embedded 8 Industry, we’ve sought to maximize the benefits for both OEMs and enterprise customers by offering three SKUs:
• Windows Embedded 8 Industry Pro. This is the ideal SKU to build ATMs and devices for the healthcare and manufacturing industries, creating a new class of industry-specific device with a sleek, powerful, modern OS.
• Windows Embedded 8 Industry Pro (Retail). This SKU provides specialized embedded functionality to get the most out of retail devices like POS terminals, kiosks, scanners and more.
• Windows Embedded 8 Industry Enterprise. Available through Volume Licensing in July, the Enterprise SKU provides embedded-specific features designed to integrate seamlessly with Windows 8 Enterprise.
Considering the possibilities opened up by Windows 8, with all its features, functionality and ease of use, we think Windows Embedded 8 Industry is really the right product at the right time to power the next generation of intelligent systems. We can’t wait to see what customers can do with it.
Get started today at getwindowsembedded8.com.
This post originally appeared on the Approaching Embedded Intelligently blog. Read the orignial post here.