Dell Technologies introduces 'Project Fire' & new IoT division

Dell Technologies has expanded its Internet of Things (IoT) footprint by dropping a range of new strategies and solutions on the market.

Overnight, the company unveiled its IoT vision and strategy, a new IoT division as well as new IoT specific products.

For the last 15 years the IT industry has seen the rise of cloud computing, a highly centralised model for delivering IT services.

And as more and more customers look to digitally transform their business - a new model of computing is emerging, claims Dell Technologies.

"IoT is fundamentally changing how we live, how organizations operate and how the world works" says Michael Dell, chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies.

David Webster, president, APJ Enterprise, Dell EMC adds, "In the Asia Pacific and Japan region, with its size of population and where the number of connected devices is growing exponentially, the opportunity that IoT presents for large enterprises is as significant as the challenge.

However, in this age of smart devices, from cars and phones to light bulbs, thermostats and heat monitors, there is a requirement for distributed and real time processing of information.

"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," says Dell.

Webster notes, "Extracting value from the vast amounts of data these IoT-enabled devices generate requires a modern IT infrastructure, that is secure from edge-to-core-to-cloud. Dell Technologies helps organisations address technology barriers and understand the whole IoT ecosystem, enabling them to innovate and differentiate their customer experience.

The company's new IoT Division will be led by VMware's CTO Ray O'Farrell, and will orchestrate the development of IoT products and services.

"Dell Technologies has long seen the opportunity within the rapidly growing world of IoT, given its rich history in the edge computing market" explains 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.

Over the next three years, Dell Technologies is investing US$1 billion in new IoT products, solutions, labs, and its partner program and ecosystem.

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

Additionally, new IoT services initiatives include:

• Advisory services including strategic consulting to set business goals, direction and strategy, infrastructure design, deployment and support services.
• 'Worldwide Herd' - consulting services 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.

Narongchai Khunpluem, mayor of the Saensuk Municipality, Thailand, notes, "Saensuk Smart City will rely on advanced technologies to make residents' lives better and improve the tourist experience for visitors to the city.

"We chose to work with Dell Technologies as they have established smart city credentials, having created highly reliable, large-scale Internet of Things projects in other cities across Asia Pacific.

"We're pleased with the implementation of the project in this first phase and are confident that the subsequent stages of the project will deliver valuable results for our city.