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Host: Hello, and welcome to this session on Edge Device Qualification with Intel^® Edge Software Hub. Today, we’ll be hearing from Craig Wetzel and Thevi Sundaralingam from Intel, along with Daniele Cleri and Victor Lai from AAEON. Together, they’ll be exploring the benefits of the Edge Device Qualification Program and how partners can use it to accelerate the development of Edge Solutions. Let’s get started. Thevi, take it away.

Thevi Sundaralingam: Hello everyone. This is Thevi Sundaralingam, with the Intel Internet of Things Group. I’m here with my colleague Craig and our partner AAEON, Victor and Danielle from AAEON team to discuss how to help accelerate your Edge Solution Development using Intel^® Edge Software Hub, specifically a unique tool we designed for self-service onboarding and testing of Edge devices. Let me start with an introduction to Edge Software Hub and how and how does it help accelerate the development of solutions for the Edge market? We launch Edge Software Hub in April 2020 with the intern to accelerate and reduce time it’s taken for our partners and especially developers inside of a partner organization to build software applications for the Edge. When you look at the challenges around what does it take to build the Edge self application and especially when solutions, the complexity is multifold. There’s a lot of heterogeneous use cases, lots of ingredients from software and hardware to put together to make the right solution that’s optimized for this targeted use case.

Edge Software Hub is designed to simplify that process for our developers by bringing together various software ingredients into a use case focus delivery, as well as partnering with the ecosystem partners in designing and making available set of Edge devices that are designed to and optimized to work best on Edge. Today, we are here to talk about our partnership on the Edge Device Solutions and how do you work with our partners. I’m going to turn it over to Craig to talk more about what does that program look like, as well as how partners can leverage it. Over to you, Craig.

Craig Wetzel: Hey, thanks Thevi. This is Craig Wetzel, Director of Solutions Scale and Intel’s IOTG division. I want to talk to you a little bit about the Edge Device Qualification process and program that Thevi briefly mentioned. This is a self-service qualification process using our EDTDT tool that allows our partners to validate our Edge Software Hub products on their devices to ensure that keep compatibility and quality for both the hardware and software in unique offerings. And these qualified devices will then be promoted out into the ecosystem as part of our recommended device page on the Edge Software Hub. And it’s as easy as, four quick easy steps. The first step, you download our EDTDT tool and you load the Edge Software Hub offerings and run the EDTDT test against that. Once you’ve validated that you apply for qualification back into Intel, and those solutions are then promoted out into the ecosystem as part of our approved list on our Edge Software Hub, the recommended device page. It’s designed to ease development for our hardware partners, but this really has to be a more of a overall hardware and software ecosystem program.

And what we really want is our ISVs and SIs who are developing applications downstream to know that they have hardware from leading providers like AAEON that are validated and qualified to easily integrate their software applications on top of. And for our hardware partners, we want them to also know that we have developers downstream who are developing, utilizing the Edge Software Hub recipes as a base so that there’s an easy matchmaking between the two. The idea is to create both a push and a pull from our programs and ease the designing. With that, I’d like to ask Victor, who is a leader at AAEON, who has been involved in this process since our very beginning, his thoughts on this and so maybe some feedback.

Victor Lai: Thanks, Craig. As AAEON, we position ourselves as an AI age computing provider and we have all kinds of industrial products and systems for different vertical markets. We also create an embedded developer platform called Up, as on Intel technology. And we allow the users to use a common platform to add on all kinds of different modules, to create solutions from fast prototypes, to mass production. And it all comes with industrial grade.

And start in 2020 last year, we started to use the Intel^® Edge Software Hub to release our product as a complete solution package with a pre-configured or Ubuntu Linux and the many validated software packages from Intel. And this helped AAEON to focus on how would product better while combining different software solutions into our products. So, with a new Edge Device Qualification Program, it help us to lavish this new platform, to bridge the developers and your customers into both hardware and software area.

And this makes user easy to find hardware devices with different software applications. And not only help us, help AAEON to engage with end developers. This new Edge Device Qualification Program, it helped us to co-work with a software ecosystem partners and we can work together to show AAEONs products for a total solution and to give to our end users. So, Daniele maybe you can also share with the audience, your user experience on the program.

Daniele Cleri: Thanks, Victor you already have highlighted the main advantages brought by the Edge Device Qualification Program. After a year in the program, I can see the many benefits for our customers, both software developers and system integrators. Thanks to the Edge Software App enabled systems, they can easily use our hardware platforms already pre-configured and validated with all the software they need for developing and integrating their AI enabled applications.

As Intel hardware partner, thanks also to the recently added EDTDT. We can now just download, install and execute these tool to efficiently test and validate our devices, configured with Edge Software app, software packages. It takes only a couple of hours to complete the test. The entire process is really straightforward and easy. Even though the Edge Device Qualification Program is already providing a lot of benefit, I think there are some points that could further improve it. For example, it would be great to have a page for hardware partners to submit the qualification application, that will speed up the process even more.

Also, the EDTDT could extend the testing coverage with more software packages and supporting the latest Intel platforms for improving the research on the website, adding more filters function on the Intel recommended device page would help find the right device easily. I also think that we could be adding a new feature for software partners to have a procedure and validate software applications to build on top of ESH. So, that can be added on the use case list webpage.

Craig Wetzel: Hey, Victor and Daniel, thank you so much for your partnership in the Edge Device Qualification and the Edge Software Hub and exciting to hear the benefits that it is to AAEON and that is always a valued perspective on areas that we can improve. As you know, Intel is always looking to enhance the portfolio and enhance the engagement with our key partners and developers. And with that, I’ll hand it over to Thevi who will speak to some of the upcoming addition to our roadmap in regards to the Edge Device Qualification Program and Edge Software Hub.

Thevi Sundaralingam: Thank you Craig, and also thank you again to the AAEON team, Victor and Daniel. We appreciate your partnership and also the feedback you’ve given us and making our program best of breed for our partners like yourself. Thank you. As we look ahead and also look around what’s happening in the edge computing market, the challenge there is simple edge computing is a very fragmented market with hundreds of use cases. Each use case require a unique software package as well as unique system solutions. Our partnership ecosystem manners like AAEON through this Edge Qualification Device Program would help accelerate and simplify the development of those applications for our partners. Our first goal with this program this year to bring together seamless way to showcase and demonstrate capability of partner solution. We have today, a recommended hardware page. I’ll show you where to access in a few minutes that showcase over 40 partners solution designed to support use cases in retail, industrial AI, and other segments.

We continue to add and expand that program with the new capabilities and new software packages, focus on different segment, as well as adopting them to the new silicon products we have launched or launching in 2021 Tiger Lake, as well as the HDDL products we are in the work. Our goal is to continue to scale capability, as well as the number of partners participating in this program this year. In addition, we are also working with our ISVs and SI partners to build use cases, utilizing these hardware, as well as the software packages we have and showcasing them. I hope as we go through this year, many of you participate with us and utilize our tools, our recommended hardwares from our partners, as well as our software packages in building the right solution faster for your customers and get to deployment sooner. One of the things we did with the Edge Software Hub is that we integrated with the existing program and make it easy for our partners who are already participating in those program to utilize the new capabilities we are rolling out through Edge Software Hub.

As you know, Intel has invested for a long time in market ready solutions program, as well as RFP Ready Kits. By utilizing the software packages and the system designs we have on the recommended hardware as we have on the Edge Software Hub, you could actually create some missions into market ready solutions and RFP ready program. Matter of fact, we encourage` you to do so. When we look at what use cases to support for Edge, we look at use cases that would help drive market-ready solutions and scale deployment scale. And so, a lot of the use cases we have built is designed around building market ready solutions and our ability kits in the near future. So it’s part of the whole ecosystem and I’ll encourage to. If you already participate in this program, I encourage you to also rethink how do you leverage Edge Software Hub.

Let me wrap it up by talking about where to find more information on Edge Software Hub and different programs that we have associated with it. We have made it symbol on how to access it. If you have time, take a moment to write down or scan the QR code shown on this page. The website is www intel.com/Edgesoftwarehub. When you get there, you would have a variety of information on how to access hardware partners, what are the developer use cases we provide, and more importantly, you could do a few clicks, simple and download. We also automating how partners could submit the submission through those pages. I invite you to go check them out and give us a feedback. Now we at the end of our presentation, Q and A sessions will start in a few minutes Stick around and we’ll be available to answer your questions for you.