Dell Technologies will invest $1-billion in a new Internet of Things (IoT) vision and strategy, an IoT division and IoT specific products, labs, partner programme and consumption models.
As more and more customers look to digitally transform their business, a new model of computing is emerging.
For the last 15 years the IT industry has seen the rise of cloud computing, a highly centralised model for delivering IT services. But in an age where every type of device, from phones to cars to light bulbs to thermostats to heart monitors are alive and intelligent, there is a requirement for distributed, real time, processing of information.
These devices simply cannot wait for a response from centralised cloud infrastructure that may be “seconds” away.
“IoT is fundamentally changing how we live, how organisations operate and how the world works,” says Michael Dell, chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies. “Dell Technologies is leading the way for our customers with a new distributed computing architecture that brings IoT and artificial intelligence together in one, interdependent ecosystem from the edge to the core to the cloud. The implications for our global society will be nothing short of profound.”
Customers have expressed a growing need for one company to pull together complete IoT solutions that can be deployed within their organisations. Dell Technologies’ approach to IoT is based on market leading technology and services and a carefully curated partner ecosystem designed to realise value for customers today and prepare them for the future.
The company’s new IoT division will be led by VMware chief technology officer Ray O’Farrell, and is chartered with orchestrating the development of IoT products and services across the Dell Technologies family.
The IoT Solutions Division will combine internally developed technologies with offerings from the Dell Technologies ecosystem to deliver complete solutions for the customer.
“Dell Technologies has long seen the opportunity within the rapidly growing world of IoT, given its rich history in the edge computing market,” O’Farrell says. “Our new IoT Division will leverage the strength across all of Dell Technologies family of businesses to ensure we deliver the right solution — in combination with our vast partner ecosystem — to meet customer needs and help them deploy integrated IoT systems with greater ease.”
Over the next three years, Dell Technologies is investing $1-billion in new IoT products, solutions, labs, partner programme and ecosystem.
Dell Technologies already provides Edge Gateways, which can be secured and managed by VMware IoT Control Center. Dell EMC PowerEdge C-Series servers have been enhanced for batch training and machine learning as a part of the distributed core. Dell EMC Isilon and Elastic Cloud Storage provide file and object storage for massive amounts of data and enable analytics through HDFS. Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) and Pivotal Container Service (PKS) provide an ideal platform for developing new cloud-based analytics applications. Virtustream’s PCF Service provides a managed Pivotal Cloud Foundry Service simplifying the deployment and operation of mission-critical cloud architected workloads in Virtustream Enterprise Cloud, while Virtustream Storage Cloud is available for off-premises cloud object storage. Finally, Dell Boomi rapidly connects relevant data to enhance cloud-based analytics and deep learning.
New product development initiatives include:
* Dell EMC “Project Nautilus”: Software that enables the ingestion and querying of data streams from IoT gateways in real time. Data can subsequently be archived to file or object storage for deeper advanced analytics;
* ‘Project Fire’: a hyper converged platform part of the VMware Pulse family of IoT solutions that includes simplified management, local compute, storage and IoT applications such as real-time analytics. ‘Project Fire’ enables businesses to roll-out IoT use cases faster and have consistent infrastructure software from edge to core to cloud;
* RSA ‘Project IRIS’: Currently under development in RSA Labs, Iris extends the Security Analytics capability to provide threat visibility and monitoring right out to the edge;
* Disruptive technologies like processor accelerators will increase the velocity of analytics closer to the edge. Collaboration with industry leaders like VMware, Intel and nvidia and the Dell Technologies Capital investment in Graphcore reflect opportunities to optimise servers for AI, machine learning and deep learning performance.
New IoT services initiatives include:
* Advisory services including strategic consulting to set business goals, direction and strategy, infrastructure design, deployment and support services.
* Implementation of ‘Worldwide Herd’, consulting services for performing analytics on geographically dispersed data — increasingly important to enable deep learning on datasets that cannot be moved for reasons of size, privacy and regulatory concern.
In addition, with the core focus on technology and services, Dell Technologies’ strategy is to grow the IoT footprint via a strong partner programme and ecosystem.
