Category: Business

Dell Teams With GE, Microsoft, OSIsoft, PTC, SAP, Software AG and Others to Advance the Internet of Things | Business Wire

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Dell today is launching the Dell IoT Solutions Partner Program for the advancement of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies and solutions. The program builds an ecosystem of partners to help customers navigate the fragmented IoT landscape and identify the right technologies to develop their IoT solutions. As a global leader in computing technology, Dell will offer participating partners access to the industry’s most robust and reliable product portfolio, world-class support and increased opportunities for incremental business growth.

“Software AG’s partnership with Dell is hugely significant for any enterprises looking for ways to simplify and cost effectively utilize the Internet of Things. Together we are bringing industrial strength real-time analytics to the edge of the IoT, significantly reducing network traffic and accelerating the ROI of IoT projects”
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The program will combine a global, multi-tiered (Executive, Associate, Registered) network of experienced Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) with Dell’s broad portfolio of IoT assets, including purpose-built, intelligent gateways and embedded PCs, security and manageability tools, data center and cloud infrastructure, and data integration and analytics software like Boomi and Statistica. These assets will help organizations develop, deploy and maintain leading-edge IoT solutions.

“Dell believes that opportunities increase when you help others win,” said Andy Rhodes, executive director, Commercial IoT Solutions, Dell. “We are passionate about collaborating with this strong group of companies and believe ISVs are critical in building the bridge between the exciting industry potential of IoT and profitable market reality.”

Dell works with Information Technology (IT) and Operations Technology (OT) organizations to create a unifying IoT strategy for bridging their differing business approaches. The IoT Partner Program will include companies across a wide range of industries that further strengthen Dell’s expertise in areas such as industrial and building automation and transportation. It launches with more than 25 partners including GE, SAP, Software AG, Microsoft, OSIsoft and others, many of which are utilizing the Dell Edge Gateway 5000 Series to power their own IoT solutions. Dell also continues to build relationships with systems integrators (SIs) with vertical expertise and deployment scale.

The Dell Edge Gateway now also supports Windows 10 for secure, reliable, and streamlined support and is Microsoft Azure Certified for IoT. Customers can depend on the Edge Gateway for seamless and security-enhanced data with the Azure IoT Suite, so they can get their projects running quickly.

Creating use case blueprints is one of the many ways Dell is working with partners to help customers speed up their IoT projects and make sense of the vast ISV landscape. Dell, Kepware, and Software AG are collaborating to develop IoT enabled predictive maintenance models utilizing distributed analytics to address the industry’s biggest operational challenges, such as unplanned downtime, overall equipment effectiveness, maintenance cost and return on assets.

With Microsoft and Blue Pillar, Dell is delivering Automated Demand Response solutions which help utilities maintain grid reliability and enable customers to realize significant value through dispatch of onsite power generation or reduction in consumption. This allows our customers to improve profitability through demand response incentives and reduce operational risks through proactive notification from the utility of potential power disruptions.

Dell and SAP are also collaborating to bring business to the edge with models designed to help address the industry’s biggest operational challenges, such as business continuity, overall equipment effectiveness, maintenance cost and return on assets.

The Dell Edge Gateway 5100 Model designed for the extended temperature ranges found in industrial environments is now available on Dell.com. Dell also launched five new accessories for the Edge Gateways, including I/O and power expansion modules, ZigBee module, CAN bus card, and IP65-rated rugged enclosure. Finally, Dell revealed new cloud-based manageability software, the Edge Device Manager (EDM), which provides centralized reporting and control of edge gateways from a single cloud-based console. Learn more about these new product updates here.

Additional partners are adding tremendous value through their specialized areas of expertise, including Azeti, Blue Pillar, Datawatch, Eigen Innovations, Flowthings, Flutura, GE, Kepware, Lynx Software, Microsoft Azure, OSIsoft, relayr, SAP, Software AG, and ThingWorx.

Partner Quotes

“Dell brings an excellent balance of purpose-built features set and the enabling security and manageability software that build credibility with IT organizations. By combining Dell’s deep roots in the industrial sector and strong focus on data-driven innovation with GE’s Predix platform, we are enabling Dell’s IoT gateways to be Predix-ready, and connect seamlessly into the Predix software stack,” said Denzil Samuels, Head of Global Channels and Alliances, GE Digital.

“Microsoft is continuing its work with Dell across our offerings for every IoT scenario, from the Azure IoT Suite to Windows 10 on the Dell Edge Gateways. Our collaboration will help both companies to ensure that our customers receive a world-class ecosystem of devices and services and time to production at industry-leading speeds,” said Caglayan Arkan, general manager, Worldwide Manufacturing, Microsoft Corp.

“Our PI System, the industry standard in enterprise infrastructure for management of real-time data and events, running on the Dell’s Edge Gateway on Windows 10 lowers the barriers to pervasive monitoring; enabling operators and engineers to capture additional sensor data without impacting or upgrading traditional automation and control systems,” said Richard Beeson, Chief Technology Officer, OSIsoft. “Our partnership with Dell to deliver IoT data to PI allows our joint customers to receive substantial enterprise insights and value.”

“Software AG’s partnership with Dell is hugely significant for any enterprises looking for ways to simplify and cost effectively utilize the Internet of Things. Together we are bringing industrial strength real-time analytics to the edge of the IoT, significantly reducing network traffic and accelerating the ROI of IoT projects,” said Eric Duffaut, Chief Customer Officer (CCO), Software AG. “Our Streaming Analytics Platform together with Dell’s purpose-built edge gateways allow customers to process large amounts of real-time data close to where the action is. This in turn drives faster automated decisions and appropriate digital responses locally, only sending a subset of critical data to the core for further analysis and action.”

Additional Links

http://delliotpartners.com/
Dell’s IoT Strategy and Partner Programs: Part One and Part Two by Laurie McCabe, Partner, SMB Group
Follow us at @Dell on Twitter and Dell Internet of Things on LinkedIn

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160419006304/en/Dell-Teams-GE-Microsoft-OSIsoft-PTC-SAP

If Apple was in talks to buy Tesla, this won’t help.

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Apple has reportedly poached a top Tesla execute, Chris Porritt, Tesla’s former VP of engineering, according to Fortune. Porrittt will likely join Apple’s secretive car project, dubbed Project Titan.

Prior to working at Tesla, Porritt was Aston Martin’s chief engineer and was also a principal engineer at Land Rover.

Apple has never publicly acknowledged that it is developing a car, but the existence of Project Titan is an open secret among tech companies and automakers. Apple has hired hundreds of automotive engineers to work on the project, many of whom previously worked at Tesla. Reports surfaced last year that Apple had been poaching so many engineers from Tesla that it was slowing down Tesla’s production.

Porritt said last year that he met with Tesla CEO Elon Musk “three to four times per week,” so he brings with him a great deal of knowledge about Tesla’s business model, production processes and supply lines, and future plans. Given that Apple is expected to make an electric, connected vehicle, just as Tesla has, that knowledge could be just as valuable to Apple as Porritt’s engineering expertise.

Apple’s car project lost its leader, Steve Zadesky, a former Ford engineer, earlier this year. It also was hit with a hiring freeze after an unfavorable review by Jony Ive, Apple’s design chief, found a lack of progress at the project, Apple Insider reported. The hiring of Porritt seems like an effort to reset the car project and make progress towards its goal of developing a car by 2019.

Quick Read: The WebVR 1.0 API Draft Proposal

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Virtual reality has come a quite long way since Oculus Rift entered the stage a few years ago, opening up a whole new range of possibilities to experience digital content. Although its use cases were blurry and undefined, it gained huge traction which lead to Facebook acquiring Oculus for $2 billion. Such great expectations also lead to the inevitable influence of VR on the web, which is not likely to be a 2D exclusive environment by the year 2020.

WebVR Cardboard Headsets

As one of the main players advocating an open and free web, Mozilla has been actively helping chart the course of virtual reality on the web. As a result of their exploration of the area, the MozVR project was founded, which today is one of the key contributors to WebVR standards alongside Brandon Jones from the Google Chrome team. These contributors recently teamed up to announce the version 1.0 release of the WebVR API proposal. This is a big step for the future of virtual reality on the web so let’s have a look at what this means.

Note: Our very own Patrick Catanzariti covered WebVR and how to get started last year at SitePoint, so if you haven’t dipped your fingers into the big and immersive world of VR, make sure to check out his article.

Improvements
Concretely, as detailed in the official Mozilla Hacks blog post, the updated APIs offer various improvements. These are in a nutshell:

VR specific handling of device rendering and display.
The ability to traverse links between WebVR pages.
An input handling scheme that can enumerate VR inputs, including six degrees of freedom (6DoF) motion controllers.
Accommodation of both sitting and standing experiences.
Suitability for both desktop and mobile usage.
Feel free to check out the API draft for more changes and details (especially if you have tinkered with VR before).

http://www.sitepoint.com/webvr-1-0-api-draft-proposal/

Web VR has me excited; you should know about it

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Mozilla is offering this week the 1.0 release of its WebVR API proposal for displaying virtual reality content in the browser.

The proposal features interfaces to VR hardware like sensors and head-mounted displays, aiding developers in building VR experiences, according to the editor’s draft of WebVR. “Recent VR technology advances and community feedback have allowed us to improve the API to address developer needs,” said Mozilla’s Casey Yee, a virtual reality designer and developer, in a blog post. WebVR was co-developed by Mozilla technologies and Brandon Jones of the Google Chrome

The 1.0 specification includes VR-specific handling of device-rendering and display, the ability to traverse links between WebVR pages, and suitability for desktop and mobile experiences. Mozilla plans to include a stable implementation of the APIs in the Firefox Nightly test browser project sometime in the first half of 2016.

Virtual reality has recently come to be viewed as ready for enterprise business use for tasks like providing virtual 3D tours and simulated test drives. In elaborating on a newfound demand for VR, Yee said he expects 2016 to be a banner year for the technology, with VR products becoming available and software companies ramping up support. “The new medium has also driven demand for Web-enabled support from browser vendors,” he said.

WebVR offers support for virtual reality devices like Oculus Rift in Web applications. The specification lets developers ranslate position and movement information from a display into movement around a 3D scene, according to the Mozilla Developer Network.

In 2014, Mozilla set up a virtual reality Web site, MozVR, functioning with iOS and Android devices, Google Cardboard-compatible headsets, and the Oculus Rift headset. The site also has required a WebVR enabler add-on when using Firefox.

Amazon Echo has some new hardware

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AMAZON RELEASES NEW ECHO DEVICES, INTEGRATES NEST AND HONEYWELL: Amazon made several major updates to its Echo connected speaker and smart home hub yesterday. The Echo is quickly becoming one of the most popular smart home products in the US, and recent research from Argus Insights showed that consumers favor the Echo over Apple’s and Google’s platforms for controlling smart home devices. The latest updates should make the Echo brand even more popular and help improve the Alexa voice assistant platform that powers Echo speakers. The new updates include a pair of smart home integrations and two new speaker products.

Amazon announced that it will integrate Echo speakers with Nest and Honeywell smart thermostats with a software update by the end of this month. Amazon just added commands for smart thermostats to Alexa’s voice recognition capabilities last month, and has already integrated the Ecobee 3 smart thermostat. The integration with Nest’s thermostat is particularly notable as the Echo and the Nest thermostat are two of the most popular smart home devices on the market. Enabling the Echo to control Nest thermostats should heighten its appeal for smart home customers.

The first new speaker, the $89 Dot, is a small hockey puck-sized device that connects into any speaker to give it Alexa’s voice recognition capabilities. That means any speaker connected to the Dot can do all the things the Echo speaker can: play music on voice command, deliver news and weather updates, control smart home devices, and order an Uber car.

The second new device, the $129 Tap, is a smaller, portable version of the Echo speaker. The Tap has Alexa’s full set of voice commands, but the device is not voice activated. Users have to manually trigger the voice recognition system by pressing a button on the Tap. Amazon said this change was made to help preserve battery life on the smaller speaker. The Tap also has to be tethered to a smartphone to get a Wi-Fi connection, allowing users to take the Alexa platform with them on the go.
US consumers’ use of Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant is still lagging behind other voice assistants, including Apple’s Siri, Google’s ‘OK Google’, and Microsoft’s Cortana, according to a recent MindMeld survey. While adoption is low, MindMeld notes that the US consumer use of Alexa has doubled from 2% to 4% in the past year.

Wireless: the next generation #iot

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The advent of 5G is likely to bring another splurge of investment, just as orders for 4G equipment are peaking. The goal is to be able to offer users no less than the “perception of infinite capacity”, says Rahim Tafazolli, director of the 5G Innovation Centre at the University of Surrey. Rare will be the device that is not wirelessly connected, from self-driving cars and drones to the sensors, industrial machines and household appliances that together constitute the “internet of things” (IoT).

Great insight on Economist.

http://www.economist.com/news/business/21693197-new-wave-mobile-technology-its-way-and-will-bring-drastic-change-wireless-next?fsrc=scn/fb/te/pe/ed/wirelessthenextgeneration

When the World Is Wired: The Magic of the Internet of Everything – Singularity HUB

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http://singularityhub.com/2016/02/09/when-the-world-is-wired-the-magic-of-the-internet-of-everything/#%2EVrpyn88UTbE%2Elinkedin

Unexpected convergent consequences: This is what happens when eight different exponential technologies all explode onto the scene at once.

An expert might be reasonably good at predicting the growth of a single exponential technology (e.g., the Internet of Things), but try to predict the future when the following eight technologies are all doubling, morphing and recombining. You have a very exciting (read: unpredictable) future.

1. Computation

2. Internet of Things (Sensors & Networks)

3. Robotics/Drones

4. Artificial Intelligence

5. 3D Printing

6. Materials Science

7. Virtual/Augmented Reality

8. Synthetic Biology

The enterprise is growing faster than consumer:IOT

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HIGH PRICES MEAN THE SMART HOME MARKET WILL DRAG ON CONSUMER IoT ADOPTION: Lack of consumer demand will inhibit IoT adoption, as many consumers are turned off by the high prices of many consumer IoT products, a recent Motley Fool article predicts. The article questioned the reliability of forecasts predicting billions of IoT devices will be deployed over the next few years, citing a consumer survey by Accenture in which 62% of respondents called IoT devices too expensive. The Motley Fool article points out that enterprises will be faster than consumers to adopt IoT devices, as  the data extracted from these devices will be extremely valuable for them.

BI Intelligence agrees with the assessment that enterprises will adopt IoT devices faster than consumers. We predict that 24 billion IoT devices will be connected by 2020, with enterprise IoT devices making up the biggest share of that installed base, followed by the government and then consumer sectors. The consumer sector will make up only about 20% of the IoT devices connected in 2020, according to our projections. Additionally, we believe that the smart home market will slow overall consumer adoption of the IoT because of the price concern that Accenture found, but other consumer IoT device categories will flourish.

The connected car, smart home, and wearables categories will make up the majority of the consumer IoT market. The connected car market is set for fast growth as automakers are connecting more and more of their models. Between 35-40% of cars shipped in the US last year were connected, and we expect about two-thirds will be connected in 2016. Typically, the car’s connection is already built into its overall cost, and consumers can often get their car added to their mobile data plan for around $10 per month.

BI Intelligence also predicts that annual wearable shipments will grow by 39 million over the next four years. Fitness trackers (the most popular category of wearables) can be bought for less than $100. To compare that to a popular smart home device, the Nest thermostat costs $250. The majority of consumers are not willing to pay $250 for Nest’s product when they can buy a non-connected thermostat for $20 or less. So we expect the smart home market to grow slowly in the near-term until device manufacturers can bring down the cost of their products to make them more affordable for consumers.

The enterprise is growing faster that consumer:IOT

· Leave a comment ·

HIGH PRICES MEAN THE SMART HOME MARKET WILL DRAG ON CONSUMER IoT ADOPTION: Lack of consumer demand will inhibit IoT adoption, as many consumers are turned off by the high prices of many consumer IoT products, a recent Motley Fool article predicts. The article questioned the reliability of forecasts predicting billions of IoT devices will be deployed over the next few years, citing a consumer survey by Accenture in which 62% of respondents called IoT devices too expensive. The Motley Fool article points out that enterprises will be faster than consumers to adopt IoT devices, as  the data extracted from these devices will be extremely valuable for them.

BI Intelligence agrees with the assessment that enterprises will adopt IoT devices faster than consumers. We predict that 24 billion IoT devices will be connected by 2020, with enterprise IoT devices making up the biggest share of that installed base, followed by the government and then consumer sectors. The consumer sector will make up only about 20% of the IoT devices connected in 2020, according to our projections. Additionally, we believe that the smart home market will slow overall consumer adoption of the IoT because of the price concern that Accenture found, but other consumer IoT device categories will flourish.

The connected car, smart home, and wearables categories will make up the majority of the consumer IoT market. The connected car market is set for fast growth as automakers are connecting more and more of their models. Between 35-40% of cars shipped in the US last year were connected, and we expect about two-thirds will be connected in 2016. Typically, the car’s connection is already built into its overall cost, and consumers can often get their car added to their mobile data plan for around $10 per month.

BI Intelligence also predicts that annual wearable shipments will grow by 39 million over the next four years. Fitness trackers (the most popular category of wearables) can be bought for less than $100. To compare that to a popular smart home device, the Nest thermostat costs $250. The majority of consumers are not willing to pay $250 for Nest’s product when they can buy a non-connected thermostat for $20 or less. So we expect the smart home market to grow slowly in the near-term until device manufacturers can bring down the cost of their products to make them more affordable for consumers.

Are you watching Sunday? Please help me out

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Been thinking a lot lately about modes of distribution, awareness and the evolution of engagement since I started The Buddy Group 10 years ago.

I am going to write a post on the topic and need your help.

Following Sunday’s game, please take 2 min to take my fun survey. I will release the results on Monday.

Much Appreciated!

Pete

 

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1xef0bsBtbpaTVRsR7Q0ckS41TQPLU9SgqIZcteU5Otw/viewform