Dell Technologies will create a new Internet of Things (IoT) division and funnel $1 billion over three years for IoT research and development. The IoT division will be tasked with developing products, creating IoT labs, and launching a partner program with the goal of delivering more predictive IoT systems.

Core to Dell’s vision is a distributed computing architecture that will incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) and conduct real-time processing of information rather than sending data to a centralized cloud infrastructure that can add latency.

VMware CTO Ray O’Farrell will head up the new IoT division, which will combine internally developed technologies with existing Dell products. VMware is a division of Dell Technologies.

For example, the company currently makes edge gateways that are secured and managed by the VMware Pulse IoT Control Center. Plus Dell EMC servers (specifically, the PowerEdge C-Series) are already using machine learning as part of the distributed core. The company will also likely incorporate the Dell EMC Isilon and Elastic Cloud Storage to provide file and object storage, and the Pivotal Cloud Foundry and container services for analytic applications.

VMware rolled out the Pulse IoT platform in May with the intent of helping companies monitor and secure IoT devices from the edge of the network to the cloud. The IoT Center consists of a management console that provides the backend device management and a client-side agent that works with IoT gateways.

New IoT Initiatives

Dell also hinted at some of the new projects it will be developing in its new IoT division, including:

  • Project Nautilus, a software that enables real-time ingestion and querying of data streams from IoT gateways.
  • Project Fire, a hyperconverged platform that is part of VMware’s Pulse IoT solutions that will simplify the management of applications.
  • Project Fire, an initiative that will help businesses roll out IoT use cases by using a consistent software from the edge to the core to the cloud.
  • Project IRIS, a security analytics program that is being developed by RSA Labs.
  • Project Worldwide Herd, an analytics program that is intended for geographically dispersed data.

Dell also said it will continue to work on the standardization and openness in IoT by participating in efforts such as the EdgeX Foundry, which is working on a common interoperability framework for edge computing; the Industrial Internet Consortium; and the OpenFog Consortium.