To leverage its scale, Dell is looking for “replicable” IoT solutions rather than “snowflakes”
LAS VEGAS–In an interview with Enterprise IoT Insights during the recent Dell EMC World event, Ron Pugh, Dell EMC OEM Solutions vice president/general manager, discussed the need to move from highly-customized IoT solutions to a more replicable process.
“There’s a short term and long term direction for IoT,” Pugh told me in a conference room inside the massive Sands Expo and Convention Center complex. “If you talk to any of the executives in here, the majority of the IoT deployments we are seeing at this time are snowflakes. Every one is different. There is no one single company that has all of the pieces to the solution. Now we’re looking to our partners to be the ones that help us create that complete solution. Where we’re going now is the successful IoT engagements at the moment typically revolve around customers having a business problem they’re trying to solve. I need to be able to monitor the fluid levels in the field. I need to be able to tell if somebody has been trespassing in my property, but I don’t want to record 17 days worth of data to find out one dog ran through the garage. Long-term, what we’re hoping for, we’re hoping that we’re going to see a trend toward replication. As we start building out these solutions, we’ll see more and more customers needing the same deliverable.”
He also discussed Dell EMC’s positioning relative to the burgeoning IoT decision of where to process data–at the edge or in the cloud.
“Historically, we’ve kind of been maybe on the shop floor–a lot of command and control. With the advent of IoT, it’s pushing us to the edge. We’re never gonna do sensors or PLCs or cameras, but as all of those technologies get more intelligent…it then starts creating this need to do analytics at the edge. Everybody wants to try to make as many decisions in the field as is humanly possible. It creates issues with regards to aggregation, it creates issue with regard to decision making…how much goes to the cloud, how much goes to the data center. We sell the entire portfolio of products.”
