Dell to invest $1B in IoT

Business news | October 13, 2017

By Rich Pell

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Announced at Dell’s IQT event in New York, the company’s plans include a new IoT division, as well as new IoT-specific products, labs, partner program, and consumption models. The basis of the IoT strategy is a new “Distributed Core” computing model – moving away from a centralized cloud infrastructure – which focuses on real time processing of information.

“IoT is fundamentally changing how we live, how organizations operate and how the world works” says Dell chairman and CEO Michael Dell. “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.”

The company’s new IoT Division – to be led by VMware CTO Ray O’Farrell – is chartered with orchestrating the development of IoT products and services across the Dell Technologies family of businesses. These comprise three core businesses – Dell Client Solutions Group, Dell EMC Infrastructure Solutions Group (which includes RSA and Virtustream), and Dell EMC Services – as well as aligned businesses Pivotal, SecureWorks, and VMware.

“Dell Technologies has long seen the opportunity within the rapidly growing world of IoT, given its rich history in the edge computing market” says O’Farrell. “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.”

The company plans several new product development initiatives:

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.

New IoT services initiatives include:

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.

The venture arm of Dell Technologies, Dell Technologies Capital, is partnering closely with the new IoT division to support its strategic agenda. According to the company, through its investments in promising startups and founders, Dell Technologies Capital “provides a valuable link to the external innovation ecosystem,” helping to accelerate the development and deployment of new IoT, AI, and machine learning technologies and solutions.

Dell Technologies