Michael Dell - Chairman and CEO, Dell Technologies
At the same time, Dell Technologies does have some firm plans around IoT and what it can offer the market. During the event in Las Vegas, for example, the company announced a joint IoT solution with Microsoft, incorporating Dell Edge Gateways, the VMware Pulse IoT Centre and Microsoft Azure IoT Edge.
The analysts suggested that these products do indeed complement each other and, together or separately, can form parts of some specific IoT solutions – but by themselves they do not constitute a standalone solution.
“As with all IoT, customers, systems integrators or IoT product creators will craft their own solutions using components from vendors such as Dell Technologies,” the analysts said.
Regardless, the TBR report also highlighted a new trend in computing that favours the cloud, and Dell Technologies’ place in its broader ecosystem. According to the analysts, the proliferation of relatively new server processors, such as graphics processing units (GPUs) and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), means that servers are becoming more diverse.
As such, Dell Technologies has introduced servers that can be configured with variable numbers of these new processors to allow optimisation for specific workloads, especially artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL) and spatial/graphical analysis.
“This diversity and specialisation of servers would give an advantage to large cloud data centres, where the customer could choose the specific configurations suitable for each workload, while maintaining a diverse on-premises data centre, which would lead to underutilisation,” the report stated.
“This situation is similar to that in which the cloud is used for 'burst' capacity while the on-premises data centre is optimised for steady loads,” it said.
In conclusion, the analysts argued that Dell technologies is addressing the challenges it faces well, with recent additions to Dell EMC’s portfolio, for example, set to help the company gain further market traction, especially in the hyper-converged and converged infrastructure market.
Moreover, Dell EMC’s growing use of NVMe, GPUs and FPGAs demonstrates its understanding of what architectural advancements it needs to make to meet current and future requirements of its customers, especially as AI and ML become more mainstream in data centres, the report suggested.
“TBR also recognises efforts Dell Technologies is undertaking to more closely align across its entire portfolio, especially as joint engineering efforts seem to be showing early dividends in portfolio enhancements and expansions, and specifically as it relates to the new announcements around Dell EMC and VMware,” the analysts said.
“However, the challenge moving forward will be how VMware manages its existing technology alliances, specifically those with Dell EMC peers such as Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Lenovo and Hitachi Vantara,” they said.
