Dell Technologies Announces New IoT Solutions to Automate Powerful, Actionable Insights

Provides scalable, secure, manageable and open infrastructure - spanning edge to cloud - so customers can realize value today and build a foundation for the future

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Dell Technologies

Aug 28, 2018, 13:17 ET

LAS VEGAS, Aug. 28, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- VMWORLD --

News summary

New solutions include hardware and software engineered to work together to support computer vision and machine intelligence from edge to cloud
New Dell Technologies IoT Solution for Surveillance speeds time to realize return on investment with flexibility and customization
New IoT Connected Bundles, created through the Dell Technologies IoT Solutions Partner Program, offers channel partners new revenue streams

Full story

Dell Technologies' Edge and IoT Solutions Division is announcing new solutions and bundles to simplify deployment of secure, scalable solutions for edge computing and IoT use cases. With these solutions, Dell Technologies is combining tools from its broad portfolio with technology from Intel and partners in the Dell Technologies IoT Solutions Partner Program. This will drive workloads for computer vision – enabled by imaging sensors – and machine intelligence – characterized by structured telemetry from sensors and control systems. Dell Technologies has collaborated with Intel, who has helped advance these solutions with their computer vision and analytics technologies.

"Workloads and use cases for computer vision and machine intelligence require different combinations of tools, but the computing infrastructure elements are the same," said Joyce Mullen, president, Global Channel, OEM and IOT Solutions at Dell Technologies. "Dell Technologies provides a scalable, secure, manageable and open infrastructure – spanning edge to cloud – so customers and partners can realize value today and build a foundation to support these workloads and case studies in the future."

Cameras provide rich information about the physical world, but the deluge of video data creates too much data for humans to cost-effectively monitor for real-time decision making. Applying analytics, such as Artificial Intelligence, to these data streams automates powerful, actionable insights. Events driven by computer vision and analyzed together with telemetry from machines – including data that imaging sensors cannot provide, such as voltage, current and pressure – results in even more powerful insights.

Because of rapid evolution in the IoT market and the fast pace of innovation required to stay competitive, many customers now require an 'IT grade' infrastructure. This should include a security-first perspective to support scalability, data diversity and the increasingly complex needs of connected devices.

Integrating Dell Technologies solutions to enable computer vision

By enabling computer vision with Dell Technologies IoT solutions, customers can more accurately, efficiently and effectively "see" relevant information pertaining to areas such as public safety, customer experience, and product inventory and quality. Surveillance is the first use case to which Dell Technologies has applied computer vision, so customers can more cost-effectively monitor events in the physical world and automate decision‐making.

The IoT Solution for Surveillance is specifically built to transform and simplify how surveillance technology is delivered with an easy to deploy and manage hyper-converged, software-defined solution. Available later this year to purchase as a package, the engineered, pre-integrated solution will provide a consistent foundation from edge to distributed core to cloud. It will also be ready to run on day one with customer data to speed the return on investment. The solution is currently available as a reference architecture to align systems and build a framework for computer vision learning and adoption for other use cases.

Built on world's leading cloud infrastructure, the Dell Technologies IoT Solution for Surveillance will offer:

Rapid return on investment – The open architecture allows for customization with immense choice of technology, purchasing and configuration. Additionally, it is flexible to adapt to changing technologies or industry regulations to meet data needs today and in the future.
Reduced risk – Dell EMC Surveillance Validation Lab tests hardware and ISV software solutions together in extreme simulations to ensure it will stand up in the real world.
Integrated security – The built-in security measures include micro-segmentation (NSX-T) and the ability to push over-the-air (OTA) updates and security patches in real time to all surveillance devices from camera to cloud. It also will include holistic management capabilities across IT and operational technology (OT) concerns through a combination of VMware Pulse IoT Center and Software Defined Data Center.
Greater reliability with scalability from hundreds to thousands of cameras/sensors – The solution offers an automated, fault-tolerant approach to scaling from 300TB to 50PB+ on Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage for private, on-premise, off-premise or hybrid needs. High availability and zero data loss will be guaranteed with vSAN RAID 5/6 across flash and disk. Additionally, ESXi Enterprise Plus enables high availability and disaster recovery services.

Dell Technologies IoT Solutions Partner Program creates new revenue opportunities for channel partners

The Dell Technologies IoT Solutions Partner Program is an award-winning, multi-tiered program supporting technology and services partners from the edge through the full Dell Technologies solution stack. Through this program, Dell Technologies has identified several partners demonstrating strong use case focus and clear return on investment to create the new Dell Technologies IoT Connected Bundles. The bundles include sensors and licensed software from partners tailored for specific customer use cases, together with various combinations of Dell Technologies infrastructure spanning edge gateway, embedded PC and server hardware. This is in addition to complimentary software like VMware Pulse IoT Center for securing, managing and monitoring these solutions at scale.

Sold fully through the channel, IoT Connected Bundles are validated, market-proven solutions that channel partners can deliver to their customers as turnkey offerings. With these solution bundles, channel partners have a new value proposition to offer their customers, as well as a new potential revenue stream. With a clear, repeatable and accelerated path to return on investment, channel partners can enter the IoT market knowing the solution will work and deliver predictable results fast.

The IoT Connected Bundles include:

ELM: compliance-aaS for HVAC, refrigeration and power systems
V5 Systems: self-contained and powered surveillance for safety and security in outdoor spaces
IMS Evolve: energy savings for grocery retailers while improving food quality and safety
Modius: advanced Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM)
Pelco: video surveillance tailored for the requirements of K-12 education
Pixel Velocity: efficient remote monitoring of field assets in oil and gas operations
ActionPoint: predictive maintenance in midmarket manufacturing
Software AG: digital manufacturing intelligence suite for larger-scale operations

Over time, additional bundles will be available through further curation in the Dell Technologies IoT Solutions Partner Program.

Enabling machine intelligence in an open and scalable way

Dell Technologies continues its commitment to openness and standardization in IoT. It actively participates in EdgeX Foundry, a vendor-neutral open source project focusing on building a common interoperability framework to facilitate an ecosystem for edge computing. The project, which has grown to more than 60 member organizations, recently announced the 'California' code release, a major step in evolving the EdgeX framework to support developer requirements for deployment in business-critical IoT applications. Dell Technologies Capital recently invested in IOTech Systems, a startup offering a commercially packaged version of this framework that enables customers to focus on their preferred value-add instead of supporting the open source code.

Dell Technologies also participates in the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC), the OpenFog Consortium and the Automotive Edge Computing Consortium (AECC).

Availability

The reference architecture for Dell Technologies IoT Solution for Surveillance is available today, and the engineered solution will be available in October 2018.
IoT Connected Bundles for channel partners will be available in September 2018.

Customer quotes
Dr. Lou Marciani, Director, National Center for Spectator Sports Safety and Security (NCS4)
"Dell Technologies has built a trusted practice for IoT and Surveillance to support our forward-thinking 2025 initiative, to bring better safety to millions of people a year who attend sporting events at large venues. The new IoT Solution for Surveillance is designed specifically to reduce the complexity of building, scaling and managing these complex environments, and we're excited to see how much this will help make our venues safer."

Jeff Burgess, President/CEO, BCDVideo
"We're excited to be one of the first validated partners to leverage Dell Technologies' new IoT Solution for Surveillance. BCDVideo has always been the 'easy button' for our security integrator customers. We continue to take the complexity out of buying, building and managing complex surveillance solutions from the edge to the cloud. Partnering with Dell Technologies on this newest initiative allows us to jointly deliver an enterprise-class, end-to-end platform that is lab tested and validated to ensure stronger security, networking and IT/OT management across the variety of software and hardware layers in the solution. BCDVideo and Dell Technologies share a vision of constant innovation, all the while protecting both the public and the infrastructure."

Analyst quote
Carrie MacGillivray, Group Vice President, IoT and Mobility, IDC
"Organizations are looking to integrated IoT solutions that bring together the storage, security, network and management and orchestration. Companies need to find a partner that understands these requirements and can help provide the piece parts to build out a holistic solution. Dell Technologies' holistic portfolio of key IoT solutions and go-to-market options make them a solid partner for your IoT journey."

Partner quotes

Jonathan Ballon, vice president, Internet of Things Group at, Intel
"Imaging and video use cases create extraordinary amounts of data and need an intelligent vision solution to rapidly analyze data near the edge, respond in near real time, and move relevant insights to the cloud. The new Dell Technologies IoT Solution powered by Intel® Vision Products including Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors and the OpenVINO™ toolkit, provides the performance, efficiency and open compute platform necessary to speed deployment of computer vision solutions to transform vision data into valuable business insights from edge to cloud."

Craig Smith, vice president, IoT & Analytics Europe, Tech Data. "Tech Data is proud of the IoT solutions we are making available to our customers around the world. These offerings are further testimony of the increasing importance of the solution aggregator role we play in IoT & Analytics. Bringing together the required components from different vendors in the form of solutions that are proven, validated and deployed at scale provides production-ready solutions for our customers and significantly speeds up the time to revenue."

Additional resources

Link to Dell EMC Surveillance page
Link to Dell Technologies IoT solutions for surveillance
Link to Dell Technologies IoT Connected Bundles
Link to Dell Technologies IoT page
Direct2DellEMC blog by Jason Shepherd on computer vision and machine intelligence
Direct2DellEMC blog by Chris Wolff on IoT Connected bundles
Direct2DellEMC blog by Mike McDonough and Ken Mill on IoT Solutions for surveillance
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About Dell Technologies

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1IDC WW Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker, Q1 2018, June 2018. Based on vendor revenue from sales of infrastructure products (server, storage, and Ethernet switch) for cloud IT.

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