Dell Introduces New IoT Strategy and Solutions to Accelerate Customer Adoption

Dell Technologies 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 realize 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 centralized 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 centralized cloud infrastructure that may be ‘seconds’ away.

“IoT is fundamentally changing how we live, how organizations 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 organizations. Dell Technologies’ comprehensive approach to IoT is based on market leading technology and services and a carefully curated partner ecosystem designed to realize value for customers today and prepare them for the future. Companies across the globe are keen to realize the potential benefits of IoT. Organizations such as Chitale Dairy in India have already implemented IoT in India and are seeing significant benefits.

Rajesh Janey, President & MD, India Enterprise, Dell EMC added: “India is currently undergoing a massive transformation to become a digitally enabled nation; and technology is at heart of this digital transformation. Smart cities, IoT, building a modern architecture, connecting devices – all these are building blocks of achieving the goal of realizing a digitally transformed India. As per NASSCOM, The global market for IoT in 2020 will be worth $373 billion in revenue, with India accounting for $10-12 billion of this revenue. Therefore, extracting value from the vast amounts of data these IoT-enabled devices generate, requires a modern IT infrastructure that is secure from edge-to-core-to-cloud. We at Dell Technologies see it as a complete, interdependent ecosystem spanning edge, core and cloud. One in which connected things, infrastructure, artificial intelligence and machine learning all come together to make things smarter.”

Alok Ohrie, President & MD, India Commercial, Dell EMC also commented, “As the number of connected devices becomes more ubiquitous, we know that intelligent computing at the edge of the network is critical. The IoT continues to enhance customer experience, drive business growth and improve lives, making it central to organizations' digital transformation strategies. As India embarks on an ambitious digital journey, Dell Technologies’ tailored IOT solutions, services and partner ecosystem enable organizations to navigate the challenges - whether its banking, healthcare, farming or digitization of citizen services, and deliver the right solution to meet their customer needs in a dynamic business environment."

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, VMware EVP & CTO, and general manager for Dell Technologies IoT division. “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.”

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 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.

Commenting on IoT’s solutions, Christopher R. Wilder, Sr. Analyst Internet of Things said, “Today there are real IoT solutions available to enterprises that increase efficiency, reduce risk, improve customer experience, and create new revenue streams and business models for their specific use cases. Moor Insights & Strategy recommends enterprises looking to identify, design, and deploy IoT solutions strongly consider Dell Technologies as a collaborative partner. Their experience, broad infrastructure portfolio, well curated partner program, world-class service, support and global scale make them uniquely positioned as one of the only tier one, end-to-end, IoT solutions provider in the industry."

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 optimize servers for AI, machine learning and deep learning performance.

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

New IoT services initiatives include:

• Advisory servicesincluding 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 program and ecosystem.

• Dell’s award-winning IoT Solutions Partner Programis a carefully curated, multi-tiered program comprising more than 90 partners from enterprises like Intel, Microsoft and SAP to start-ups like Action Point, IMS Evolve, FogHorn and Zingbox.
• The program will now support partners across all Dell Technologies businesses, allowing for easier collaboration and implementation of blueprints.
• An example of the partner ecosystem at work is the recent announcement that VMware and SAP are collaborating to create an integrated solution for IoT analytics and vertical applications. The solution utilizes VMware Pulse IoT Center, SAP Cloud Platform and SAP Leonardo and is designed to help customers roll out IoT use cases faster and scale more easily.

Dell Technologies continues the commitment to openness and standardization in IoT by participation in efforts such as EdgeX Foundry, the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) and the OpenFog Consortium. Seeded by Dell source code, EdgeX Foundry is a vendor-neutral open source project building a common interoperability framework to facilitate an ecosystem for edge computing. Since launching in April 2017, EdgeX Foundry has grown to more than 60 member organizations. Recently the project announced its first major milestone with the ‘Barcelona’ code release, as well as an alliance with the IIC to collaborate on testbeds.

IoT is creating new revenue models for customers and, in turn, new financing options. Dell Technologies provides customers with cloud-like payment flexibility through Dell Financial Services flexible consumption models. These payment solutions are available across the Dell Technologies family of business and allow customers flexibility in technology acquisition and consumption.

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 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