Dell Bets Big on IoT with Several New Announcements

Dell is fully embracing the internet of things (IoT) and carving its path into a more connected future with several announcements revolving around their adoption and progression into distributed computing models.

The massive digital infrastructure unveiled new strategies relating to how they plan on implementing IoT as a core strategy, including the use of AI to deliver smarter and more predictive systems, a brand new IoT division (along with products, labs and partner programs) and a hefty investment in R&D over the next three years.

“IoT is fundamentally changing how we live, how organizations operate and how the world works,” said Michael Dell, CEO 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 reasoning behind the extensive push into the sector is due to Dell’s recognition that many clients needed a full-scale IoT solution as opposed to adopting bit-by-bit. Dell has the resources to lead a comprehensive approach and curate ecosystems for customers that will bring IoT to their companies today and prepare them for the future.

The new Dell Technologies IoT division will be led by VMware CTO Ray O’Farrell. The division has the goal of orchestrating the production and roll-out of IoT services across the entire company by using both internally developed products as well as ones drawn from the Dell ecosystem.

“Dell Technologies has long seen the opportunity within the rapidly growing world of IoT,” 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.”

Dell will also make a massive $1 billion investment into the company’s distributed core future as well. The company already has some IoT offerings already, like Edge Gateways and the Dell EMC Isilon and Elastic Cloud Storage. Customers can also check out a newly designed IoT lab as well.

A few new initiatives were also outlined, such as Project Nautilus, software that enables the ingestion and querying of data streams from IoT gateways in real time; Project Fire, a hyper-converged platform that enables businesses to roll out IoT use-cases quicker and more efficiently; and Project Worldwide Herd, software that helps perform analytics on geographically dispersed data.

Working to bring companies into the future is the major goal for Dell, and their new IoT Vision Workshop and Technology Advisory will help businesses develop high-priority use-cases and design the necessary architecture and blueprints for implementation.

On top of this, Dell is extending all Dell Technologies businesses to take part in their IoT Solutions Partner Program, allowing even more clients to implement and launch a distributed computing model.

Finally, the venture capital arm of Dell will work to highlight new startups in the IoT sector and accelerate their use and growth in the field. Companies like Edico Genome, FogHorn Systems and Zingbox are all companies that Dell has investments in and/or partnerships with which are being featured today at Dell’s IOT day in New York City.