IoT gateway touts embedded analytics

Dell unveiled an IoT (Internet of Things) gateway with embedded analytics to take on industrial automation and transit, and a custom IoT engineering team at its annual Dell World conference.

"The explosion in devices is really just beginning," CEO Michael Dell said during a keynote speech. "[Machine-to-machine] communications, artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics, drones, [and] enormous amounts of sensors are the next trillion-dollar opportunity for growth in connectivity. The ability of business to compete will be its ability to process and analyse that application."

The Dell Edge Gateway 500 series meant to aggregate IoT data is based on the Intel Atom processor E3800 family and runs at 1.3-1.75GHz. It has expanded input and output interfaces, a wide range of operating temperatures, and access to data analytics capabilities along with a flexible choice of OSes.

The Dell Edge Gateway will be available in select countries in December 2015. (Source: Dell)

"Organisations are struggling to make the best decisions regarding the data volume and complexity created by the vast numbers of sensors, embedded systems and connected devices now on the network," Andy Rhodes, executive director of Dell Commercial IoT Solutions, said in a release. "As more of the data is processed in real time at the edge of the network, the gateway becomes the spam filter for IoT."

But the head of Dell's OEM solutions believes gateways "are just a gap." The tier one companies that traditionally make gateways have different ideas on process control and don't have the scale to provide support to the 20+ billion connected devices expected by 2020.

"The value to the customer is all the stuff that happens post-gateway. It's in the analytics, it's in the insights in the connections, in the back office trend analysis," said Joyce Mullen, general manager of Dell's OEM group.

The Edge Gateway has built-in analytics services that will allow companies to extend the benefits of cloud computing to the network edge. But it's still early days in IoT, said Mullen.

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