“For IoT innovations to be reliable, they must be built on a foundation of security. Qualcomm Technologies will allow partners to innovate with the assurance that their products, customers, and brands are secured,” explained Galen Hunt, distinguished engineer, and managing director, Microsoft Azure Sphere. “The new IoT chipset will light up a broad set of new scenarios at the outer edge—even the most resource-constrained ones. Together with the silicon innovation and cellular and embedded security expertise, Qualcomm Technologies brings, our partners will have the freedom to securely connect devices anytime, anywhere.” The release marks an expansion of Microsoft and Qualcomm’s partnership. The pair previously worked on the Qualcomm Vision Intelligence 300 Platform. They’re also co-operating on Always Connected PCs, including Microsoft’s Surface Pro X, which houses a custom Qualcomm SQ1 processor. “We hope to enable exciting new business transformations for customers in a variety of verticals, where powerful edge computing, low latency connectivity, and end-to-end security can make an important difference,” said Jeffrey Torrance, vice president of business development, Qualcomm, of the release. The chip will come pre-configured with Azure out of the box and will be able to connect to Azure Sphere security cloud services. According to ZDNet, Microsoft CVP Roanne Sones said at the Qualcomm 5G summit that customers had been asking for cellular connectivity. This is what led to the partnership with Qualcomm, and products that should ultimately make it easier for customers to get started with Azure Sphere.
