Intel Edge Software Center is launched to help enterprises reduce costs and increase efficiency

At the "Intel Intelligent Edge Innovation Day" event, Intel Corporation launched the "Intel® Edge Software Hub" (hereinafter referred to as the "Edge Software Hub"), which can help developers and customers obtain software tools, quickly develop prototypes, reduce R&D costs, and accelerate product launches through a one-stop ecological resource supply. Relying on the intelligent edge reasoning acceleration performance of Intel's open source OpenVINO™ toolkit on heterogeneous computing platforms, the "Intel® Edge Software Hub" can now provide corresponding one-stop edge insight software packages for vision, industry, and retail fields, helping companies develop cost reduction and efficiency improvement, improving user experience, and enabling industry technology innovation.

Zhang Yu, Chief Technology Officer and Chief Engineer of Intel's Internet of Things Division in China, said: "Intel's Internet of Things Division has gathered the experience and achievements of various teams in the industry for many years to launch the Edge Software Center, which will open up software resources and design architectures suitable for various industry scenarios through this platform. We hope that more developers and partners will benefit from Intel technology and quickly implement intelligent edge solutions."

Understanding industry challenges, the open platform solves development pain points in one stop

The performance limitations of IoT edge devices caused by space, power consumption and cost requirements, the requirements of enterprises for rapid time to market of low-cost solutions, and the complex and diverse heterogeneous deployment brought about by various application scenarios have become the three major industry challenges facing the development of IoT edge applications.

However, faced with a large number of complex software tools, developers often encounter "choice barriers". In practice, the difficulty of using software tools, poor synergy with hardware products, and low reliability of long-term updates and maintenance have become common pain points for enterprises and developers.

In this regard, the "Intel® Edge Software Center" effectively reduces R&D costs through fully deployed and verified software packages for various vertical applications, customized components and easy installation experience, as well as quick-start documentation and development tutorials. At the same time, the center can use reference designs for various vertical applications to quickly develop solutions and accelerate product entry into the market. Not only that, the Edge Software Center also regularly lists and updates technical resources, and with the help of cooperation and promotion of Intel ecological projects, it helps users obtain one-stop ecological resources, providing rich resource support for development and innovation.

A well-stocked “online supermarket” with a rich selection of products and edge insight packages

The "Intel® Edge Software Center" is like a well-stocked "online supermarket" with a wide range of products displayed on virtual shelves, which can provide rich resource allocation for innovative research and development in the fields of industrial Internet, intelligent robots, smart retail, smart cities, etc.

The "Intel® Edge Software Center" has launched edge insight software packages for three vertical fields: industry, retail, and vision. The software packages provide software modules and architecture designs for industry needs, and are fully verified and can be quickly deployed on various platforms. At the same time, for each edge insight software package, the center is also equipped with commercial-grade reference examples, such as predictive diagnosis and system maintenance, and real-time sensor fusion for loss detection; in addition, Intel has also worked with many ecological partners to provide a list of fully verified edge devices. Developers can use this list to obtain a series of XPU recommended hardware for edge insight software deployment, as well as IoT developer kits such as neural computing sticks, to meet the personalized and customized needs of different application scenarios. Using the "Intel® Edge Software Center", users only need to easily get started through the tutorials provided by the center, download the software combination installation script, and then use the reference code and recommended edge devices to quickly generate deployable solutions, and finally submit the solutions to Intel® Internet of Things Development Kits (Intel® RFP Ready Kits) or Intel® Internet of Things Industry Overall Solutions (Intel® Market Ready Solutions) to obtain more promotion support.

Compared with the past situation where ODM/OEM (original design manufacturer/original equipment manufacturer) lacked software and solution development capabilities, and SI/ISV (system integrator/independent software developer) needed to invest a lot of time and cost to provide solutions, after adopting the Edge Insights software package, ODM/OEM can conduct performance evaluation more efficiently and conveniently, and generate development kit products and solutions; for SI/ISV, they can quickly carry out targeted application development according to different needs, fully improving R&D efficiency and technological innovation.

Three edge insight software packages enable innovation in various vertical fields

Intel believes that only the success of the ecosystem is the real success. Currently, Intel has worked with many partners to provide customers in the industrial, retail, and visual fields with an extraordinary user experience through edge insight software packages.

In the industrial field, the Industrial Edge Insights software package collects, stores and analyzes edge-side image and video data and real-time data, and uses modular design and data bus structure to flexibly configure processing machines, image and audio workloads, effectively reducing factory operating costs, increasing production capacity and improving efficiency. Yu Tao, CEO of Vision Intelligence, said: "After adopting the Intel Edge Insights platform, the introduction of deep learning algorithms improves the environmental adaptability of the solution, avoids the environmental sensitivity of traditional algorithms, reduces the workload of re-collecting data, debugging and training models when changing products on the production line, improves drug production efficiency and detection accuracy, saves intelligent costs, and shortens the deployment cycle."

In the retail sector, the software package can provide EdgeX® middleware integrated with various standard data and communication protocols, as well as containerized machine vision applications for artificial intelligence applications in the retail industry, which can improve the ability to obtain and utilize data and improve the customer's retail experience. Zhang Shuo, a senior product manager from Thundersoft, said: "As a world-leading provider of intelligent operating system products and technologies, Thundersoft is also very willing to cooperate with Intel and other top technology companies through the Open Retail Initiative (ORI) and the retail edge insights software package of the Edge Software Center to fully utilize the advantages of the ecosystem and implement more vertical solutions in the retail sector and other emerging industries." At present, the 2020 EdgeX China Challenge is in full swing. The release of the "Intel® Edge Software Center" will also provide more efficient product selection support for competition developers, and further promote the development of China's IoT application innovation.

In the field of vision, the Edge Software Center integrates edge runtimes and containerized deployments from multiple cloud service providers, fully leveraging the performance of Intel vision acceleration products to enable innovation in edge machine vision applications. Qin Gao'e, Visual R&D Director of Xinjie Electric, said: "With the help of Intel vision software based on the OpenVINO™ toolkit, we have effectively optimized the machine vision welding solution, which can fully meet the needs of different users for the efficiency and quality of automatic welding systems, thereby greatly improving its market competitiveness."

In the future, Intel will update and release new software resources for the Edge Software Center every quarter. Along with reference examples and industry deployment cases created with more industry partners, the "Intel® Edge Software Center" will provide continuous product support and innovation outputs for users and developers in various fields, helping the intelligent edge to unleash value in various fields of the Internet of Things.