Dell Technologies Investing US$1 Billion in IoT Over Next Three Years

On October 10, 2017, Dell Technologies announced that it was launching a new Internet of Things (IoT) division aimed at integrating products and services across the company. Dell also announced plans to invest US$1 billion in research and development over the next three years. Dell is continuing to move away from centralized cloud computing to a distributed core that enables real-time processing of information to create one interdependent ecosystem from the edge to the core to the cloud. For this strategy and investment to pay off, Dell will leverage its existing partner program ecosystem to create the value that Dell is hoping to deliver to current and future clients.

The top three vertical markets Dell is focused on within IoT are manufacturing, transportation & logistics, and energy. Mission-critical applications within these verticals cannot wait for a response from a centralized cloud infrastructure and instead need data to be processed in real time. Additionally, Dell will create an IoT Solutions Division that will serve as a sort of marketplace by integrating internally developed technologies with offerings from the Dell Technologies ecosystem of partner offerings to deliver end-to-end solutions for customers. Dell Technologies is also working on new product development initiatives, including: 

• Project Nautilus, a software that enables data streams to be ingested and queried from IoT gateways in real time while also enabling data to be archived for further analysis later.
• Project Fire, a hyper-converged platform aimed at simplifying device management, storage, and creation of IoT applications.
• Project Iris, a security analytics tool aimed at providing threat monitoring at the edge.
• Project Worldwide Herd, a tool that allows data analytics to be performed on geographically disparate data. 

Dell Technologies’ recent investments, acquisitions, and partnerships within this space are aimed at creating a comprehensive offering of IoT solutions and services across verticals. Dell’s announcement and strategy is aimed at uniting otherwise disparate divisions and departments to collaborate with each other. Dell has been in the IoT since 2012, and even then, it’s IoT strategy was focused on its gateway business. By developing a gateway business at the edge, such as protocol brokering at the edge of the network, Dell has leveraged its partners to have an end-to-end IoT portfolio offering. Partnerships with Microsoft, VMWare, Cloudera, and other players help Dell to create an integral new system around the gateway.

Dell’s recent strategies are aimed at buoying its strengths within the IoT market while also addressing weaknesses and threats it faced before. In the past, Dell seemed to be more focused on it communications hardware. While many industrial verticals had a distinct need for communications hardware, other verticals that were growing in their use of IoT were more focused on the analytics and software side of IoT. In building out its own internally developed analytics and software tools, Dell is expanding its reputation beyond a gateway provider. Additionally, the investment in research and development will allow Dell to target more verticals such as healthcare, retail, and hospitality. While other IoT providers seem to have a reactive approach to establishing strategies within their markets, Dell has established a proactive strategy that will allow it to continue delivering value within the IoT marketplace.