Dell aims to help companies sift video at the edge for 'actionable insights'

• Offerings include hardware and software engineered to work together to support computer vision and machine intelligence
• Promises to speed return on investment  
• New IoT ‘Connected Bundles’  offer channel partners new revenue streams

Dell has announced new technical combinations to tackle the IoT plus ‘edge’ opportunity it sees emerging with next gen networking and IoT use cases. In particular, it wants to drive workloads and applications for computer vision, enlisting imaging sensors and machine intelligence, as well as ‘structured telemetry’ from sensors and control systems.

“Workloads and use cases for computer vision and machine intelligence require different combinations of tools, but the computing infrastructure elements are the same,” says 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.”

The problem with video cameras, says Dell, is that although they clearly  provide rich information about the physical world, it all comes as a deluge of video data - way too much for humans to cost-effectively monitor for real-time decision making. The answer is real-time analytics using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to provide what Dell calls actionable insights. To do this effectively, upstream data must be intercepted at the first (or nearly the first) opportunity and analysed at the edge of the service provider network (on either the enterprise or CSP side of the boundary), discarding all the data that contains nothing of interest lest it clog up the Internet on the way to the cloud. This means that more data can actually be collected for analysis, so that “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,” claims Dell.

Dell says surveillance is the first use case to which it’s 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.

Dell has developed an ‘IoT Solutions Partner Program’ for its channel partners. The resulting 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.

According to Carrie MacGillivray, Group Vice President, IoT and Mobility at 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."