The company said it intends to deliver this capability fully integrated into our Windows Server family probably as a plug-in or upgrade option. Kevin Dallas, general manager of its Windows Embedded business unit, said the intention is to develop the offering over the next two to three years.
The move by Microsoft is recognition that ever more devices are becoming what Dallas called IP-connected, converting them into endpoints in a client/server relationship and creating the potential for remote monitoring and management, as well as the activation of new features on CE gear.
Dallas said there are several functions that Microsoft wants to expose to its server software at the back end as services: management (provisioning, activation, decommissioning); usage (monitoring for billing, marketing and so on); location (tracking inventory); advertising (pushing tailored ads where appropriate); and service capability (enabling, say a personal navigation device to receive entertainment content, or integration of the device into a web services environment via the WSDL language).
Dallas said Microsoft is not planning its own mapping technology, and instead will work with existing developers, exposing an API from with its embedded OSes (CE, XPE, Vista) to facilitate the service.
Our View
It is a logical move for Microsoft to want to provide some kind of central management capability for its embedded OSes. In the consumer space, it seeks to take share in the emerging digital home or digital living room market, as do Cisco and many other players.
On the business side, embedded OSes go into things like programmable logic controllers and other industrial automation components. Process industry automation is already moving from proprietary protocols to IP, and a number of enterprise IT players have begun to express ambitions, usually through alliances with traditional vendors in this market.
It will also be interesting to see whether Microsoft decides to offer some sort of service delivery platform for devices running its Windows Mobile OS, which by any other name would be a mobile device management product.
