Over a decade ago, the Internet of Things (IoT) became the new cool as the technologically advanced world evolved, to a new era of automation and machine connectivity to achieve greater efficiency in business process.
Today, Dell Technologies is at the fore front of a new IOT strategy which places an emphasis on “making systems smarter”.
The IOT strategy day event by Dell Technologies in New York this week has shown more than anything else, that the possibilities for an intelligence driven future are simple endless.
Developing countries such as Nigeria are no doubt far behind in deploying IoT systems and capabilities but regardless, cannot afford to be left behind. This is where the world is heading towards and Nigeria can’t afford to be stuck in ‘stone age’.
As Michael Dell, chairman and chief executive officer of Dell Technologies puts it; “AI and Machine learning will soon be the jet engine of human progress.”
Even though Nigeria and many other developing countries may not particularly have so much going in terms of IoT, AI and even Machine Learning, it is still important to highlight the possibilities, and of course, how much more industrial growth is possible. These are huge markets with enormous potentials for industrial growth which can be accelerated through cutting edge data analytics and smart systems.
On Tuesday, 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. The announcements, according to Dell, underscore the company’s 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 oil rigs to robots to heart monitors are alive and intelligent, there is a requirement for a “distributed core” focused on 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, the company’s CEO
“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,” Dell said.
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 leading technology and services and a carefully curated partner ecosystem designed to realize value for customers today and prepare them for the future.
New Dell Technologies IoT Division
One of the major announcements during the IOT day was the company’s new IoT Division which will be led by Ray O’Farrell, CTO at VMware. The new division 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,” said O’Farell.
$1 billion investments in IoT Future – Products, Labs, Partner Program
Over the next three years, Dell Technologies has expressed commitment in 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 Pulse™ 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.
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.
- 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.
To be continued next week…
