I have recorded another in my series of occasional podcasts. This one begins with the Ignition Community Conference at Inductive Automation in Folsom, California last month.
What is SCADA? What is the Internet of Things. I keep puzzling out these things and the technologies that underlie them.
We need to feed an ever increasing global population. One major problem concerns loss of good farmland to urban development.
AeroFarms is an agriculture start up leveraging the latest of ag science along with technologies such as Internet of Things with Dell Technologies IoT platform to help solve a big problem.
The company president presented at the IQT Day event. It’s a powerful example of using technology to do good for the world. Here is a link to a video interview. You’ll have to scroll down when you get to the page. Worth three minutes of your time–followed by an hour of thinking about using your engineering talents to solve big problems.
Dell Technologies has moved its Internet of Things initiative from what was almost a “skunk works” group to division status. Michael Dell, CEO, Jeremy Burton, CMO, and Ray O’Farrell, VMware CTO and GM of the new division all spoke to a large group of international journalists, analysts, and influencers Tuesday October 10 to unveil the new division and a host of other news.
Since the “things” of the Internet of Things are generally smart, Dell Technologies dubbed the new initiative as IQT or the IQ of Things.
[Dell Technologies provides transportation and a room for me to attend its events and sometimes compensates me for some of the interviews and writing I do. However, what I write and say is purely mine.]
Takeaway: Dell is seriously approaching manufacturing along with other industries in its IoT push. It approaches the great IT/OT divide from the IT side of things rather than my usual sources who are from the OT side.
Dell introduced me to its IoT work about two years ago. I’ve watched the group grow. Then came the mega-acquisition/merger between Dell and EMC forming Dell Technologies. Read the press release below and the bulleted highlights carefully and notice that the merger is well along in optimization. Often these mergers consume management time for years. In this case, a mere year has passed and much integration has been accomplished.
By the way, Dell set up a “Newsdesk” before the event where they interviewed the six Influencers invited. Here is a link to my interview. Others included Bob Egan, William McCabe (who interestingly enough had just spent time in my hometown of Jackson Center, Ohio–how’s that for weird), Eric Vanderburg, Tamara McCleary, and Dan Newman.
News summary
Rather than the usual marketing speak of a press release, this one is well crafted. So, I present to you the full press release from Dell Technologies diving into the announcements
Full story
Dell Technologies today unveiled its Internet of Things (IoT) vision and strategy, a new IoT division as well as new IoT specific products, labs, partner program and consumption models. The announcement underscores Dell Technologies commitment to helping customers realize their digital future by safely navigating the complex and often fragmented IoT landscape.
IoT, a New Distributed Model for Computing
As more and more customers look to digitally transform their business, a new model of computing is emerging. For the last 15 years the IT industry has seen the rise of Cloud Computing, a highly centralized model for delivering IT services. But in an age where every type of device, from phones to cars to oil rigs to robots to heart monitors are alive and intelligent, there is a requirement for a “distributed core” focused on real time processing of information. These devices simply cannot wait for a response from centralized cloud infrastructure that may be ‘seconds’ away.
“IoT is fundamentally changing how we live, how organizations operate and how the world works” said Michael Dell, chairman and chief executive officer of Dell Technologies. “Dell Technologies is leading the way for our customers with a new distributed computing architecture that brings IoT and artificial intelligence together in one, interdependent ecosystem from the edge to the core to the cloud. The implications for our global society will be nothing short of profound.”
Customers have expressed a growing need for one company to pull together complete IoT solutions that can be deployed within their organizations. Dell Technologies’ comprehensive approach to IoT is based on leading technology and services and a carefully curated partner ecosystem designed to realize value for customers today and prepare them for the future.
New Dell Technologies IoT Division
The company’s new IoT Division will be led by VMware CTO Ray O’Farrell, and is chartered with orchestrating the development of IoT products and services across the Dell Technologies family. The IoT Solutions Division will combine internally developed technologies with offerings from the vast Dell Technologies ecosystem to deliver complete solutions for the customer.
“Dell Technologies has long seen the opportunity within the rapidly growing world of IoT, given its rich history in the edge computing market” explained Ray O’Farrell, VMware EVP & CTO, and general manager for Dell Technologies IoT division. “Our new IoT Division will leverage the strength across all of Dell Technologies family of businesses to ensure we deliver the right solution – in combination with our vast partner ecosystem – to meet customer needs and help them deploy integrated IoT systems with greater ease.”
Organic Investments in our IoT Future – Products, Labs, Partner Program
Over the next three years, Dell Technologies is investing $1B in new IoT products, solutions, labs, partner program and ecosystem.
Today Dell Technologies already provides Edge Gateways, which can be secured and managed by VMware Pulse IoT Control Center. Dell EMC PowerEdge C-Series servers have been enhanced for batch training and machine learning as a part of the distributed core. Dell EMC Isilon and Elastic Cloud Storage provide file and object storage for massive amounts of data and enable analytics through HDFS. Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) and Pivotal Container Service (PKS) provide an ideal platform for developing new cloud-based analytics applications. Virtustream’s PCF Service provides a managed Pivotal Cloud Foundry Service simplifying the deployment and operation of mission-critical cloud architected workloads in Virtustream Enterprise Cloud, while Virtustream Storage Cloud is available for off-premises cloud object storage. Finally, Dell Boomi rapidly connects relevant data to enhance cloud-based analytics and deep learning.
New product development initiatives include:
Customers can also now visit one of the newly designed Dell Technologies IoT Labs.
New IoT services initiatives include:
In addition, with the core focus on technology and services, Dell Technologies’ strategy is to grow the IoT footprint via a strong partner program and ecosystem.
Dell Technologies continues the commitment to openness and standardization in IoT by participation in efforts such as EdgeX Foundry, the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) and the OpenFog Consortium. Seeded by Dell source code, EdgeX Foundry is a vendor-neutral open source project building a common interoperability framework to facilitate an ecosystem for edge computing. Since launching in April 2017, EdgeX Foundry has grown to more than 60 member organizations. Recently the project announced its first major milestone with the ‘Barcelona’ code release, as well as an alliance with the IIC to collaborate on testbeds.
IoT is creating new revenue models for customers and, in turn, Dell Technologies is offering new financing options to support those customers. In particular, Dell Technologies provides cloud-like payment options through Dell Financial Services flexible consumption models. These payment solutions are available across the Dell Technologies family of business and allow customers flexibility in technology acquisition and consumption.
Investments in IoT Future through Dell Technologies Capital
Dell Technologies Capital, the venture arm of Dell Technologies, is partnering closely with the new IoT division, providing industry insight and relationships to support its strategic agenda. Through its investments in promising startups and founders, Dell Technologies Capital provides a valuable link to the external innovation ecosystem, effectively accelerating the development and deployment of new IoT, AI and ML technologies and solutions. Dell Technologies Capital will be showcasing some of these startups and investments at the company’s New York IQT event, including:
Dell Technologies family consists of the following brands: Dell, Dell EMC, Pivotal, RSA, Secureworks, Virtustream and VMware.
Remember the wireless sensor network “wars” from ten years ago, or so? Harry Sim left Honeywell Process to head up a new endeavor of Cypress Semiconductor to exploit these networks in a variety of different environments. I told him at the time that I thought he had a good chance for success.
Yesterday he wrote to me with an update. I thought I’d share it–partly as a positive example for you budding entrepreneurs out there.
New York City: If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere! For our company, there is a lot of truth to that phrase, since Cypress Envirosystems technology retrofits existing buildings – and New York has more buildings than any other US city.
Back in 2012, we eyed NYC from our perch in Silicon Valley…it is the largest city with the densest concentration of existing buildings, with perhaps the fiercest business competition. As the CEO of our startup company, I had a personal goal to build a strong business there – just to prove that we have what it takes to win in the toughest market.
Now, five years later, we have completed the upgrade of over 50 buildings in New York City, including schools, hospitals, universities, office buildings, and courthouses. These include iconic structures such as the majestic courthouses at Civic Center, the 65 story Deutsche Bank headquarters on Wall Street, the venerable CUNY campus in Lower Manhattan, Kings County Hospital, and K-12 schools in all five boroughs. In addition, our WPT technology is deployed at 3.5 million square feet at the Weiss and Javits Federal buildings, the tallest government buildings in the US, housing the Department of Homeland Security, FBI, Social Security, Customs and Immigration, General Services Administration and other agencies.
And our pace is accelerating. In the next six months, another 31 buildings are already planned for upgrade. The NYC government has independently tested and vetted our WPT technology – and it is now included in municipal retrofit specifications (see press release from New York City DCAS Commissioner Lisett Camillo here).
Cypress Envirosystems’ solutions use patented non-invasive technologies to make existing buildings smarter, more comfortable, and more efficient with a minimum of cost and disruption (these days, it is called the Internet of Things – see MSN/Tech Republic interview here). I now have the satisfaction to know that we can make it in New York, and we play an important role to help this world class city become more efficient and sustainable.
Despite our progress however, we have barely scratched the surface of what can be done. New York City alone has over 4,000 municipal buildings, and another ten times that many in the private sector. Not to mention Chicago, LA, Philadelphia with similar building stock. The majority of them will benefit from the same unique technologies we have already deployed over the past five years – but our challenge will be to do 100 times more, and faster, over the next five years. The exciting journey continues for us…thank you for taking this moment to allow me to share our story with you.
Forgoing a couple of vacation days, I headed out to Folsom (Sacramento), California this week to attend the gathering of SCADA geeks known as the Inductive Automation Ignition Community Conference.
This was the fifth conference for the company and my third. This is the second straight sell out. The venue was packed, energy level high, networking intense.
I remember meeting Founder/Owner/CEO Steve Hechtman about 14 years ago at a trade show. He explained a new way to build SCADA and a new business model that would upset the current dominant competitors. He emphasized building from the ground up with IT friendly technology.
He did it. From a small building in Sacramento to 22,000 square feet of rented office space (where they positioned people near aisles to make the space look more packed only five years ago) to a building down the street that they’ve gutted and rebuilt to give their 56,000 square feet. Looks like they’re doing well.
Emphasis of all the keynote speakers was on Ignition (Inductive Automation’s product) as a platform.
Don Pearson, chief strategy officer, talked digital disruption. He cited a survey that reported 84% of business leaders expect disruption, yet only 7% have a strategy, “sitting on the fence is not an option.”
Inductive is a proponent of Open Process Automation Forum making this the second straight conference I’ve attended with OPAF as a sub theme.
Ignition is “perfectly poised for IIoT.”
Two questions I had:
It’s still just SCADA, but what is it really these days. What is it that makes it still exciting. After talking with many people, I figured out these things:
Hearing once again about OPAF, I wondered:
Will it just be another OMAC?
On the other hand, some innovative small companies are moving in who just might change the direction of industry.
Big push on community. Don, “The community is our North Star.”
This is the only company in this technology area currently exhibiting growth, enthusiasm, and new technologies. Do competitors write off SCADA as an old market? Well, in this era of the Internet of Things, that will be a mistake–much to the benefit of Inductive Automation.
