Dell Technologies Unveils New IoT Strategy, Division and Solutions to Accelerate Customer Adoption

Dell Technologies has unveiled its Internet of Things (IoT) vision and strategy, a new IoT division as well as new IoT specific products, labs, partner program and consumption models. Today’s announcement underscores Dell Technologies commitment to helping customers realise their digital future by safely navigating the complex and often fragmented IoT landscape.

IoT, a New Distributed Model for Computing
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.

New Dell Technologies IoT Division
The company’s new IoT Division will be led by VMware CTO 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 vast 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” explained Ray O’Farrell, general manager, IoT, Dell Technologies and CTO, VMware. “Our new IoT Solutions Division will work across all of our businesses to ensure we deliver the right technology – in combination with our vast partner ecosystem – to meet customer needs and help them deploy IoT systems more quickly and more reliably.

“IoT is fundamentally changing how we live, how organisations operate and how the world works” said Michael Dell, chairman and chief executive officer 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’ comprehensive 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.

Organic Investments in our IoT Future – Products, Labs, Partner Program
Over the next three years, Dell Technologies is investing $1B in new IoT products, solutions, labs, partner program 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 analytic applications.  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;
• VMware ‘Project Fire: part of the VMware Pulse family of IoT solutions, Project Fire is a hyper-converged platform with simplified management suitable for deployment in the ‘distributed core’, providing local compute, storage and real-time analytics (through Project Nautilus);
• 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.

Customers can also now visit one of the newly designed Dell Technologies IoT Labs.

Investments in IoT Future through Dell Technologies Capital
Dell Technologies Capital, the venture arm of Dell Technologies, is partnering closely with the new IoT division, providing industry insight and relationships to support its strategic agenda. Through its investments in promising startups and founders, Dell Technologies Capital provides a valuable link to the external innovation ecosystem, effectively accelerating the development and deployment of new IoT, AI and ML technologies and solutions. Dell Technologies Capital will be showcasing some of these startups and investments at the company’s New York IQT event, including:

• Edico Genome, creator of world’s first processor designed to analyse next-generation sequencing data
• FogHorn Systems, a leading developer of edge-device intelligence software for IoT solutions
• Graphcore, a developer of next-generation processors optimised 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