Dell Technologies has expanded its edge partner ecosystem with Hyundai AutoEver, a factory IT/OT integration tool from car maker Hyundai, and Intel’s OpenVINO developer toolbox, commonly used for edge AI applications. The latter is now part of its NativeEdge Blueprint catalogue of edge design models for factory-floor digital solutions. At the same time, Dell has integrated the manufacturing edition of its Dell Validated Design partner platform, where Hyundai AutoEver is now available, into its core NativeEdge proposition. Both the Hyundai and Intel collaborations have been on show at Hannover Messe in Germany this week.
The firm has also been showing digital twin capabilities with XMPro, quality control with AI cameras from Cognex, and on-prem threat detection from Claroty. It told RCR Wireless that its edge partner ecosystem is growing fast. It has 20-odd partners engaged with its “horizontal” NativeEdge platform across three industrial sectors, namely manufacturing, ‘retail’ (supply-chain logistics, including warehouses and ports), and energy. About a dozen (“10-to-11”) are in the manufacturing space. More will be announced at its Dell Technologies World partner event in the US in late May, it said. Its ‘digital cities’ segment crosses into these three disciplines, too.
“There are many more to come; we keep extending. We already have a strong pipeline,” said Pierluca Chiodelli, in charge of Dell’s edge portfolio and customer operations. He added: “Dell is helping manufacturers derive more value from their edge data with AI. They can simplify deployments, manage applications, and scale them both quickly, while maintaining factory security.” Dell started its “edge journey” three years ago, he said, having polled enterprises about their issues with Industry 4.0 and settled on an open edge infrastructure orchestration platform, tied to Dell servers, which takes data from any IT/OT/IoT devices over any network technology in “zero-touch and zero-security” fashion.
Chiodelli commented: “Everybody was doing a platform solution with a prescribed [infrastructure] stack, and without guaranteeing lifecycle management – as if security was an afterthought. So there is all this different hardware for all of these different applications on the factory floor – for preventative maintenance, building monitoring, machine vision, and so on. There was an opportunity to simplify, optimise, and secure the edge. Which led us to build Native Edge – as a horizontal platform to automated and secure infrastructure with zero-touch and zero-trust… across the far edge, near edge, the core [edge], and the cloud.”
He added: “The difference is our platform is very open at the top. So you can integrate whatever you need. We expose our hardware capability to the application on top. After that, everything is open for the ISV and the SI to integrate.” At the same time, in January last year, Dell bought devops orchestration outfit Cloudify, which underpins its developing NativeEdge Blueprint proposition, which provides the template for edge infrastructure and solution deployments, and where Intel’s OpenVINO framework has been integrated. It deals with the scale and multiplication question, about how to easily “define intent” in Industry 4.0 deployments.
Chiodelli explained: “The challenge was also how to prescribe and describe the outcome that’s needed, which is where NativeEdge Blueprint comes in – to define intent. Because the edge is not different to the cloud in the sense that if you want to prescribe what you want for your entire edge, then something should have the intelligence to grab the things that it needs and deploy the application and configure the application.” It also works as a digital twin, effectively, so any changes to an Industry 4.0 setup, whether in infrastructure or solutions/devices, can be uploaded and modelled in the Blueprint, and redeployed in the factory.
He added that the challenge in Industry 4.0 with “the resistance of IT/OT” has been largely overcome. A major part of the reason for this is that the enterprise market and the supplier market are seriously engaged, suddenly, with how to architect new edge-and-cloud systems to support the AI revolution, and old mental blocks have more or less evaporated. Chiodelli said: “That has changed. We are at a turning point. Enterprises are looking at ways to connect the AI inferencing at the edge and the ML training in the cloud; and you need a connected CI/CD pipeline to do that. And that is forcing enterprises now to connect IT and OT.”
He added: “AI is very good at learning very basic things, and solving wastage in testing, in factory automation, in supply chain – so you don’t have people trying to solve the lack of connectivity between systems, and stuff like that. That’s what AI is for. It is a serious investment for Dell, internally (just as it is for enterprise customers) – to save time, and therefore to save costs, and therefore to reinvest in other areas. And it doesn’t need to be super fancy [to] save a tremendous amount of money. Right now, everything is about AI. And we’ve been around long enough to think this happens every time with new technology. But this is different.”
Chiodelli articulated the enterprise sense and architectural logic of generative AI in the industrial space, too. “It’s like, you have a machine and a PLC, and a guy managing them both; and these three have lived together for 30 years. And the guy knows everything, but there is no connectivity outside of that. Now everything is connected. Before, that guy was only thinking about his machine and his PLC, and how to take care of them. But now, where everything is connected, and you have all the data, and the inference is at the edge and the training is in the cloud, then you can start to do very interesting things.”
