Dell Technologies today announced a new edge computing platform that provides customers choice around software, IoT, multicloud tools, and operational technology to simplify, automate, and manage edge infrastructure.

“We really do see the edge as the next frontier for our customers' business transformation, where data becomes that competitive advantage that is created immediately,” Sam Grocott, Dell Technologies SVP of product marketing, said during a pre-briefing.

Take that belief and couple it with the high adoption rates of edge infrastructure, and that's “why we feel right now is the right time for us to jump in, have a strong point of view, and deliver a great new experience for edge customers,” he explained.

“If you think about edge and Dell, this is not new for us,” Grocott touted. “We have the industry's strongest footprint in edge,” he added.

He said that means the vendor understands “the game has got to change,” he said, citing Dell's new customer-based requirements introduced with Project Frontier, which the company is banking on as the “next frontier” for its multicloud strategy.

The Project Frontier platform will aid enterprises in simplifying, automating, and managing their edge operations more securely, efficiently, and at scale, Grocott explained.

According to Dell Tech's SVP of Edge Gil Shneorson, security and compliance are major reasons enterprises should move their compute to the edge, but connectivity also plays a significant role, he explained during the briefing.

To make real-time decisions, you need to be physically close to where data is collected. Today's reality of a distributed edge creates new challenges, Shneorson noted.

The Project Frontier platform, which has been in the works for a few months, was designed around three core components: a secure edge environment with tightly integrated hardware and software at the endpoint, remote infrastructure management, and application orchestration, he explained.

“We can create a very aggressive or very robust security strategy,” Shneorson said, referencing Dell's hardware tamper detection process and secure device onboarding. The latter allows Dell to “programmatically deploy compute on customers' networks with zero touch in a firewall-friendly way,” he said, noting the “secure communication” happening between all pieces of the platform.

The platform's infrastructure management focus is centered on controlling edge devices remotely and securely during the application lifecycle. Dell will offer this service as an on-premises deployment in a customer's own data center or cloud properties, but it will also be available in SaaS form via the vendor's third core piece of the platform – application orchestration.

Some edge applications run at the edge, but many more run in a data center or in the cloud. “We're going to allow our customers – whether it's a homegrown application, an ISV [infrastructure service provider] application from one of our ecosystem partners, a hyperscaler runtime, others – to describe in a industry standard blueprint and then orchestrate fairly sophisticated workloads across all of those properties so their applications can run seamlessly, automatically, and lifecycle them together with the edge endpoints,” Shneorson explained.

Shneorson sang the new platform's praises and highlighted why this might be attractive to enterprise customers.

“It's going to simplify our customers' edge operations significantly by introducing unprecedented levels of automation from hardware, through the software environment, the remote management, and the applications,” he said.

The platform will also optimize enterprise investments because it allows for the consolidation of multiple use cases on edge infrastructure. “[Customers] are going to have choice of IoT runtimes, IoT stacks, hyperscaler runtimes, and their own application confidence to optimize their investment. We're going to give them choice on hardware and configure-to-order to make it all work for them. And we're going to accelerate the time to market and deployment. And then we're going to secure it,” he said. “This is what Project Frontier is all about.”

Going forward, he said Dell will continue working with its partners and customers and design the platform to meet their evolving needs. Customers like SI Partners and original equipment manufacturer (OEM) vendors are currently part of Dell's edge design program and receive early access to the Project Frontier code as it develops. Shneorson said Dell plans to invite more partners to join the program.

The Project Frontier platform is scheduled to launch sometime next year.