Dell Technologies Unveils IoT Strategy, Division, & Solutions

Today at Dell Technologies' IQT Day in New York City, the company announced that it was tackling the Internet of Things (IoT) market by unveiling its vision and strategy that includes a new IoT division as well as new IoT specific products, labs, partner program and consumption models. Part of this strategy and vision includes a new “Distributed Core” computing model as well as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning technology working with existing IoT infrastructure. Dell Technologies is also announcing a billion dollar investment in IoT research and development over next three years.

Today at Dell Technologies' IQT Day in New York City, the company announced that it was tackling the Internet of Things (IoT) market by unveiling its vision and strategy that includes a new IoT division as well as new IoT specific products, labs, partner program and consumption models. Part of this strategy and vision includes a new “Distributed Core” computing model as well as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning technology working with existing IoT infrastructure. Dell Technologies is also announcing a billion dollar investment in IoT research and development over next three years.

IoT has grown quite a bit in the last few years. What was commonly thought of for such things as smart thermostats (that the original models were more about novelty than functionality), it now applies to something a bit sexier such as things like self-driving Tesla Model S’s. On the industrial side IoT can be used to lower costs while improving output. The problem with most IoT devices now is that they need a common “language” to talk to and interact with one another and have the ability to process data in real-time. Dell Technologies is addressing this issue with its “distributed core.”

Dell Technologies is launching a new IoT division aimed at developing IoT products and services across their entire family. This new division will be lead by Ray O’Farrell, CTO of VMware. The IoT Solutions Division isn’t only focused on internally developed IoT technology; it will also reach out through Dell Technologies’ vast ecosystem helping its customers and partners to deliver complete solutions.

Dell EMC already produces Edge Gateways for IoT, these Gateways can now be secured and managed by VMware Pulse IoT Control Center. To further support the distributed core, Dell EMC PowerEdge C-Series servers have been enhanced for batch training and machine learning. IoT technology will produce a massive amount of data that needs to be stored and analyzed, for this purpose Dell EMC will use Isilon and Elastic Cloud Storage for both file and object storage as well as analytics through HDFS. Also on analytics is Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) and Pivotal Container Service (PKS) for cloud-based analytics applications. And Dell will be using Boomi to connect data enhancing cloud-based analytics and deep learning.

New product development initiatives and service 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 optimize servers for AI, machine learning and deep learning performance.
• Project ‘Worldwide Herd’: 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.
• IoT Vision Workshop – identifies and prioritizes high-value business use cases for IoT data – essentially how and where to deploy IoT analytics that drive business.
• IoT Technology Advisory – develops the overall IoT architecture and roadmap for implementation.

IoT technology reaches across several companies and works best when all of the IoT devices can talk with each other. Noting this, Dell Technologies is both expanding its partner program and ecosystem, as well as continuing its commitment to openness and standardization in IoT. Dell’s partner program now supports partners across all Dell Technologies businesses. For openness, Dell Technologies is participating in efforts such as EdgeX Foundry, the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) and the OpenFog Consortium. EdgeX Foundry is a vendor-neutral open source project building a common interoperability framework to facilitate an ecosystem for edge computing. Seeded by Dell source code and launched in April 2017, EdgeX Foundry has grown to more than 60 member organizations.

Realizing the importance of IoT, Dell announced that they are investing $1 billion over the next three years in IoT projects and R&D. Dell EMC isn’t limiting this investment only to its own company. Thought its venture arm, Dell Technologies Capital, it will be helping to funding several startups with promising technology. Dell EMC showcased several of these companies today at the IQT event including:

• Edico Genome, creator of world’s first processor designed to analyze next-generation sequencing data
• FogHorn Systems, a leading developer of edge-device intelligence software for IoT solutions
• Graphcore, a developer of next-generation processors optimized to accelerate AI-solutions
• Moogsoft, a market leader in applying Artificial Intelligence to IT Ops (AIOps)
• Zingbox, a developer of IoT security solutions to enable the Internet of Trusted Things

For customers that want to take full advantage of IoT technology, Dell Technologies is offering new financing options. Dell Technologies will provide a cloud-like payment options through Dell Financial Services flexible consumption models.

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