On October 10, Dell Technologies held its first IQT Day, which is symbolic of the company’s view of the meeting of Intelligence (IQ) and IoT Technology (IoT), at which it unveiled its Internet of Things (IoT) vision and strategy, a new IoT division, and a series of IoT specific products, labs, partner program and consumption models. In addition, the company announced its intention to spend at least $1 billion on IoT research and development.
During his keynote remarks, Michael Dell, Chairman and CEO, Dell Technologies, said “I believe that AI and machine learning will be the jet engines off progress and Dell will be the fuel.”
He went on to talk about the IQ of things, or the so-called, IQT, as the next evolutionary step in computing, and that it lives in the company’s new Distributed Core, which is part of the IoT infrastructure located between the Edge devices and the Cloud. In the core, a facility can perform localized, advanced analytics in order to decrease latency, while saving money on bandwidth usage.
“We need a new highly distributed computing model,” Dell said. “The IQT is the infrastructure for the next industrial revolution.”
This strategy, the company said, is drawn from customers who reportedly have expressed a growing need for one company to pull together complete IoT solutions that can be deployed within their organizations. Dell Technologies is setting itself to be that provider.
The company’s new IoT Division will be led by Ray O’Farrell, CTO, VMware, and now General Manager of the Dell IoT Division, and he 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” 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.”
Over the next three years, Dell Technologies’ billion dollar investment will go toward new IoT products, solutions, labs, partner program and ecosystem. New project 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;
- 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.
Dell Technologies continues its 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.
Ken Briodagh is a writer and editor with more than a decade of experience under his belt. He is in love with technology and if he had his druthers would beta test everything from shoe phones to flying cars.Edited by
Ken Briodagh
