Microsoft Corp. last week announced the return of its hardware-focused event. The purpose of Windows Hardware Engineering Community (WinHEC) will be to bring the hardware engineering community together in one place. The software giant will provide an opportunity to interact with technical and business experts from Microsoft, other partners, and customers, facilitating exchange of ideas, best practices, and opportunities.

WinHEC will be more than a single annual conference, like it used to be. WinHEC will consist of technical conferences and smaller, more frequent, topic-focused workshops that are local to the hardware ecosystem hubs, such as China and Taiwan. WinHEC will feature executive keynotes, deep technical training sessions, hands-on labs as well as question and answer sessions on topics across the spectrum of Windows-based hardware.

The first WinHEC technical conference will be held in Shenzhen, China on March 18th and 19th. Since the vast majority of hardware is produced in China, it makes a great sense to hold a hardware-related event in the country. The Shenzhen ecosystem consists of numerous hardware companies covering electrical design, software engineering, integration, manufacturing, and all other aspects of the computing-device supply chain, said Microsoft.

Microsoft held the last WinHEC in 2008. Starting from 2011 the software giant held its annual Build conference in the U.S., which was focused primarily on software. It looks like Microsoft now understands the value of hardware-centric conference for its ecosystem.

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KitGuru Says: It is nice to see a major hardware-related event back. While the new WinHEC will clearly be significantly different than the old one, it will still cover hardware innovations and will therefore provide opportunities for many companies to announce new products or show new concepts.

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