Experiencing Intelligent Systems in Hospitality and Retail

By Jeff Wettlaufer, Technical Program Manager, Windows Embedded

Hi everyone, it has been an incredibly exciting few weeks around the Redmond campus. The launch of Windows 8, the release of Surface (I’m writing this blog on my own Surface with Windows RT) and the Intelligent Systems Leadership Summit, shows we have been having a lot of fun. Last week we also hosted the Build conference here on Campus, where several thousand of our favorite developers descended to talk about apps in one of the largest temporary facilities I have ever seen stood up. There is no question this is an exciting time in the industry.

With the ‘wave’ of Windows 8 launch happening, we wanted to highlight some areas where Intelligent Systems drive new and compelling scenarios using Windows Embedded 8.  At the Intelligent Systems Leadership Summit we showcased several vertically aligned scenarios about how Windows Embedded plays a critical role from the sensor, through embedded devices, to the cloud.

We thought it would be interesting to highlight those demonstrations here for you on our blog. So, this is the first in a 3 part series of posts. In this post, we will highlight Intelligent Systems and how they support hospitality and retail. Future posts will showcase medical and manufacturing examples.

What’s key about this video is it shows how businesses can extend their edge to where the customer is. In the case of this demo, it’s the airport, hotel and even retail partners. Microsoft has made significant technology investments to re-imagine the Windows experience with Windows 8. In the Embedded space, this translates to thinking about not just the device, but the connected services that are part of the solution. 

While the first part of the video shows the customer experience of an intelligent system, the latter portion of the video showcases the Northwind Resorts Hotel Management dashboard. What we wanted to showcase here is what we are seeing our embedded ecosystem driving. That is, connected devices, cloud services, and the combination of on-premises sensors and kiosks with real-time web services. Through the management dashboard, the hotel staff can see hotel infrastructure, backend enterprise systems, on-premises real-time equipment and web services. The dashboard brings these into a single simple view that enables Northwind to really optimize how they run their business. 

The coolest part of this is that we have partners all over the world delivering these types of solutions today. Check it out, and thanks for visiting. 

This was cross posted from the Approaching Embedded Intelligently blog. See the original post here.