New York – Dell Technologies is going all in on the Internet of Things, announcing the creation of a Dell Technologies IoT Division that will encompass IoT solutions across its entire portfolio. This includes products like Dell Edge Gateways and solutions like VMware’s Pulse IoT Control Center.
Michael Dell, CEO and founder of Dell Technologies, opened the company’s IQT Day event in New York with a simple statement. “It’s the internet of things, and ultimately it will be the internet of everything,” Dell said.
At the beginning of 2017, just months after the creation of the umbrella that is Dell Technologies following the merger with EMC, the company realized that while it had many singular IoT products and solutions across the board, and it understood the impact that IoT will have, but it did not have a singular IoT message.
As Jeremy Burton, CMO of Dell Technologies, explained it to Canadian media, Dell Technologies as a whole went on a fact-hunting mission to discover what benefits and opportunities could arise from IoT, and this summer it became apparent that there would need to be an entirely new IoT division that would encompass everything IoT within Dell Technologies.
“We realized that if we don’t have a central team putting this together, then we may find ourselves in knots,” Burton said.
This means that the the Dell IoT Division is the first division to encompass the full breadth of what makes up the Dell Technologies family. This includes Dell, Dell EMC, Pivotal, RSA, Secureworks, Virtustream, and VMware.
Here are the technologies from the Dell Technologies family that will be apart of this new division:
- Dell provides the hardware in the Edge Gateways;
- Those Edge Gateways are then secured and managed via the VMware Pulse IoT Control Center;
- PowerEdge C-Series Servers from Dell EMC have been enhanced for batch training and machine learning as part of the distributed core. Dell EMC Isilon and Elastic Cloud Storage provides file and object storage for data and enables analytics through HDFS;
- Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) and Pivotal Container Service (PKS) provides a platform for developing new cloud-based analytics applications;
- Virtustream’s PCF Service provides a managed Pivotal PCF Service that simplifies the deployment and operation of mission-critical cloud architected workloads in Virtustream Enterprise Cloud. Virtustream Storage Cloud is then available for off-premises cloud object storage;
- And lastly, Dell Boomi connects relevant data to enhance cloud-based analytics and deep learning.
Ultimately, the goal is to make it easier for Dell to have a one-stop shop for its IoT capabilities – or as Burton put it, to have a singular IoT message across the entire company. Dell Technologies is also investing an additional one billion dollars in new IoT products, solutions, labs, partner program, and ecosystem.
VMware CTO Ray O’Farrell will head up the new IoT Division as the new general manager of the Dell Technologies IoT Division. Since he is apart of the Dell Technologies leadership team, he will be reporting directly to Michael Dell and the senior leadership team. He will maintain his position as VMware CTO as well.
Burton explained that O’Farrell lead the charge on collecting all the facts the company would need to make IoT decisions, so he was the natural pick for heading this new division. “We needed someone who has a broad appreciation and understanding of this technology, and who is capable of dealing with the many parts of Dell. [O’Farrell] fits that bill,” he said.
With the new IoT Division also comes new product development initiatives, or ‘projects’, that Dell has been working on. They are:
- Dell EMC Project Nautilus – Streaming data and storage software that enables the ingestion and querying of data streams from IoT gateways in real time. Data can be archived to file or object storage for deeper advanced analytics;
- VMware Project Fire – Specialized hyper converged infrastructure that is part of the Pulse family of IoT solutions. It focuses on enabling businesses to roll-out IoT use cases faster and have consistent infrastructure software from edge to core to cloud;
- RSA Project Iris – Intrusion prevention and detection that extends the security analytics capability to provide threat visibility and monitoring at the edge. Currently under development in RSA Labs;
- Project Worldwide Herd – The company’s new consulting platform for IoT that performs analytics on geographically dispersed data. Enables deep learning on datasets that cannot be moved for reasons of size, privacy, or regulatory concern.