Taiwanese firm Lanner Electronics, a designer and manufacturer of intelligent edge computing appliances, has partnered Microsoft Azure to launch edge-to-cloud AI products.

These integrate Lanner AI accelerated intelligent edge appliance with Azure IoT edge module, runtime and cloud interface. Leveraging Azure IoT edge capability to execute the AI inference model, the appliances are said to simplify AI deployments at the edge, reducing communications latency and increasing workload efficiency.

The accelerating deployment of AI in competitive markets has evolved hardware requirements down to the very edge of networks. Lanner provides configure-to-order edge AI platforms engineered for compute-intensive, AI-powered video analytics in the network edge.

Powered by the Intel xPUs, PoE connectivity and AI acceleration support with Intel, Nvidia and Hailo DL processors, the AI inference systems can run a variety of computer vision algorithms to improve the AI-based video applications, such as retail video analytics, machine vision, physical security and traffic monitoring.

Lanner AI and machine-learning products are also validated and edge-ready out-of-the-box for streamlined AI deployments and a spectrum of silicon partners’ toolkits. SDKs and libraries fast-track edge AI with a catalogue of software for edge-to-core deployments

Microsoft’s Azure IoT service is based on its enterprise experience and adopts a design suitable for all organisations. The service leverages IoT platforms to build IoT products. With secure, enterprise-level, predictable pricing and industry-focused features, it can be expanded with business growth, ensuring that assets can be reused and integrated with existing business applications.

Lanner Electronics provides design, engineering and manufacturing services for purpose-built network appliances and rugged applied computing platforms for OEMs, system integrators, service providers and application developers.

Azure is a cloud computing service created by Microsoft for building, testing, deploying and managing applications and services through Microsoft-managed data centres. It provides software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and supports different programming languages, tools and frameworks, including both Microsoft-specific and third-party software and systems.