Dell Technologies Boosts IoT Offering With New Products And Partnerships

Dell Technologies has announced a trifecta of Internet of Things (IoT) focused products and services to simplify IoT deployments as part of its broader digital transformation narrative.

The company cites a business need for faster, real-time analysis of the data that will be produced by a rapidly-growing number of connected devices, referencing a Gartner report which suggests that there will be 20.4 billion connected ‘things’ in use globally by 2020.

With today’s announcements, Dell’s IoT portfolio encompasses infrastructure, embedded PCs, IoT gateways, security and manageability solutions to allow for the “fast innovation and simplified integration” of such platforms.

Product push

The first new offering is a secure infrastructure management platform which gives businesses control over all of their connected devices.

The VMware Pulse IoT Center helps customers efficiently manage, operate, scale and protect their IoT devices and will be offered as the preferred enterprise management and monitoring platform for Dell Edge Gateways.

Next is the IoT Technology Advisory Service, a new consulting offering from Dell EMC Services to help organisations understand the architecture required to get the most out of IoT data collected from the likes of sensors, beacons and wearable devices.

The service will enable businesses to design initiatives based on this data, such as optimising operational processes, create new revenue opportunities and improve customer engagement.

Finally, Dell is joining forces with over 50 other companies including AMD, Foghorn and VMware to start an open source framework for interoperable edge computing that will aim to build a common framework for other businesses to follow.

EdgeX Foundry, which was recently launched by The Linux Foundation, will be architected to work on any hardware or operating system and will provide an ecosystem of components that can be combined to create secure and scalable IoT services

Dell contributed over a dozen micro-services and 125,000 lines of source code to kickstart the project, with additional contributions from the other members already underway.

New partnerships

As well as the products and services, Dell has increased its IoT-focused partner base through its various partner programmes.

For example, Dell has joined forces with Bosch to jointly develop an ‘Industry 4.0’ starting kit consisting of Bosch XDK sensors, a Dell Edge Gateway and cloud integration software to help customers quickly implement IoT projects.

The company is also working with Atos to address the growing IoT analytics market and built an Internet of Things service management framework called Atos Codex IoT Services.

The framework will contain a catalogue of services related to device management, connectivity, data storage, support and incident response to increase IoT resilience and help businesses get the most of out of their connected devices.

“We are proud to help Atos enhance their IoT service offering, which will leverage our comprehensive portfolio such as Dell Edge Gateways to securely transfer and analyse important data at the edge of the network and Dell EMC hyper-converged infrastructure and scale-out storage at the core,” said Jay Snyder, senior vice president of global alliances for industries and service providers at Dell EMC.

“Combining these assets with Atos’ expertise, services, hardware and their IoT capabilities in the Atos Codex end-to-end managed analytics offering, we are well positioned to help our customers successfully deliver their IoT-driven digital transformation agenda.”

These announcements add to what has already been a jam-packed Dell EMC World 2017, with the company having already announced a myriad of storage, cloud and data protection updates.

The technology powerhouse has also staked its claim to lead today’s digital transformation revolution in what it believes will be a multi-cloud world as president and CEO Michael Dell set out the company’s strategy for 2017 and beyond.

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