Dell Technologies has outlined its ambitions as a leading IoT supplier at its IQT Day, as Malek Murison reports from New York.
On top of a pledge to invest more than $1 billion in IoT R&D over the next three years, Dell executives have unveiled a new, dedicated Dell Technologies IoT Division at the company’s IQT Day in New York this week.
The restructuring, they claim, will allow Dell to move forward with a focus on a ‘distributed core’ computing model – or, in other words, edge computing. This approach will be the basis of the company’s new IoT strategy, a move dubbed by VMware CTO Ray O’Farrell as “digital transformation 2.0” for the company.
The new distributed core model is aimed at moving analytics operations closer to the ‘edge’ of customers’ IoT systems, in a transition that the company claims will alleviate latency and speed up real-time data processing.
Read more: VMware, SAP team up for enterprise IoT adoption race
From edge to core to cloud
O’Farrell is tasked with leading Dell Technologies’ digital transformation 2.0 as general manager of its newly established IoT Division. As well as orchestrating the development and roll-out of IoT products and services, the new division will combine internal technologies with solutions from Dell’s substantial partner ecosystem.
“Dell Technologies has long seen the opportunity within the rapidly growing world of IoT, given its rich history in the edge computing market”, said 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.”
Read more: Dell expands Internet of Things partner solutions program
A cool $1 billion
Much of Dell’s IQT event was focused on the company’s IoT innovations going forwards. Among the announcements were a range of initiatives aimed at solving some of the typical challenges faced by customers deploying IoT projects.
These include ‘Project Nautilus’, an initiative that will develop software to enable the ingestion and querying of data streams from IoT gateways in real time. There’s also ‘Project Fire’, a platform from VMware’s IoT solutions that simplifies management and localizes compute, storage and analytics capabilities.
‘Project IRIS’, currently under development in RSA Labs, will aim to extend the reach of security analytics out to the edge. Meanwhile, ‘Project Worldwide Herd’ will enable analytics on geographically dispersed data – particularly useful to customers whose datasets cannot be moved for reasons of size, privacy and regulatory concern.
In an earlier briefing, Scott Darling, president of Dell Technologies Capital, the company’s investment arm, took time to highlight the work of funded start-ups including Edico Genome, creator of world’s first processor capable of sequencing the human genome in under 30 minutes.
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Busy day for Dell
In all, the day marked a wave of announcements and initiatives from Dell Technologies that constitute a renewed focus on the future of IoT.
“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.”