UPDATED 11:00 EDT / OCTOBER 10 2017

INFRA

With new strategy, Dell will invest $1B into the ‘internet of things’

Dell Technologies Inc. may be late to the “internet of things” party, but it has brought plenty of friends.

Leveraging the numerous acquisitions, partnerships and investments it has made over the past few years, the company today is outlining an internet of things strategy anchored by what it calls the “distributed core,” in which information is processed at the most appropriate point in the network, regardless of where that may be.

Dell said it will invest $1 billion in new IoT products, research and partnerships over the next three years. The company is tapping the chief technology officer of its VMware Inc. subsidiary, Ray O’Farrell, to lead a new group called the IoT Solutions Division that will combine internally developed technologies with products from Dell’s partner ecosystem and investments.

The company took the opportunity to highlight some of those investments – including IoT management vendor FogHorn Systems Inc., machine learning startup Graphcore Ltd. and IoT security developer ZingBox Inc. – to underscore the scope of its resources and perhaps remind customers that it hasn’t been sitting on the sidelines while the IoT phenomenon gains steam.

In a similar vein, Dell emphasized that the existing products in its portfolio are already appropriate for IoT deployment, or soon will be. For example, it said Dell EMC PowerEdge C-Series servers have been enhanced for batch training and machine learning to support the distributed core. Its Isilon and Elastic Cloud Storage are appropriate for storing the large data volumes that IoT networks demand and the Cloud Foundry platform as a service from Dell’s Pivotal Software Inc. subsidiary can be used to build cloud-based analytics applications to support large networks of intelligent devices.

Dell’s announcement was short on specifics and long on strategy, but it appeared to hit all the right buttons, said David Vellante, chief analyst at Wikibon, a sister company of SiliconANGLE. “On paper, it looks like Dell is doing the right things in forming a dedicated internet of things division, blending edge data ingestion with analytics and announcing relevant products from across its portfolio,” he said. “The big question is whether Dell can demonstrate clear differentiated value. Dell is as well-positioned as any IT supplier, so I think they can.”

Dell also announced several new development initiatives without specifying deliverables:

  • Project Nautilus is described as a real-time analytics and streaming storage package that combines the open-source Pravega software-defined storage primitive, Apache Flink for stream analytics and Dell PowerEdge servers.
  • Project Fire is a hyperconverged component of the VMware Pulse internet of things line that enables IoT network deployment to be accelerated through simplified management, local processing and real-time analytics.
  • Project Iris from Dell’s RSA Security LLC subsidiary will provide visibility monitoring for IoT devices while developing new mechanisms for detecting compromises based on anomalous behavior.
  • Project Worldwide Herd is an effort to develop an analytics platform for machine learning on geographically dispersed data that can’t practically be consolidated or centralized.

Part of Dell’s credibility challenge will be convincing enterprises that it can solve the software problems that the internet of things presents. Networks of distributed, intelligent devices challenge the centralized information technology and cloud computing model by requiring processing to be distributed and the results federated. What form that model will take is still up for debate, but the trend is clear. Gartner Inc. has forecast that 75 percent of enterprise-generated data will be created and processed outside the data center or cloud by 2022, up from 10 percent today.

Dell emphasized the strength of its software subsidiaries and emphasized it will do its part by participating in such standardization efforts as EdgeX Foundry, the Industrial Internet Consortium and the OpenFog Consortium. Wikibon’s Vellante said the software element is key. “The thing to watch is whether Dell can form and lead an ecosystem that can shape the future of the internet of things and make software the core of its value proposition,” he said.

Image: Pixabay

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