Dell EMC: Simplify Digital Transformation with Enterprise IoT for ...

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Dell EMC: Simplify Digital Transformation with Enterprise IoT for Improved Business Outcome Date: March 2017 Author: Nik Rouda, Senior Analyst Abstract: Empowering digital transformation with Internet of Things (IoT) represents vast opportunities for businesses, and IoT adoption has accelerated in the last 6-12 months. The traditional technology buying lifecycle that includes evaluation, planning, architecting, and implementation has shrunk from a long, draining exercise spanning months or years to a new era where changes can often be made in days. To be successful in these endeavors, IT must: • Define its approach to augmenting digital transformation with IoT across the organization. • Understand how to evaluate and extend an infrastructure for enterprise IoT—core, edge, and cloud with data

transparency and right-time intelligence. • Accelerate maturity progression from concept and proof of value to production-ready. • Take advantage of unique value from the industry’s broadest infrastructure portfolio by Dell Technologies, Dell EMC,

and its partner ecosystems.

Capturing the Value of Enterprise IoT Most successful businesses today operate on both physical and digital planes of existence. Often, the physical environment directly delivers the value to customers, while the digital endeavors to create the opportunities. For example, even heralded Internet-era giants like Amazon and Uber balance across both arenas, efficiently transporting packages and people while optimizing their sales, marketing, and operations with analytics. Similarly, most businesses span both central locations and geographically distributed ones, from headquarters to branch offices, and from factories through warehouses to retail stores and customers’ homes. In the Internet of Things (IoT) era, there are many opportunities to update the traditional mechanisms of monitoring, analyzing, and finding new insights and efficiencies. In essence, accommodating IoT as part of digital transformation serves as an opportunity to not only add “things” to data, but also resolve the preexisting challenges of accessing fresh real-time data, or months or years of archival data, where you can discover patterns or use them for governance, risk, and compliance mandates. The logical core of the enterprise is the headquarters, where central planning and decision-making take place, supported by data centers to manage consolidated information. Edge locations are where most physical interactions, transactions, and exchanges of value happen, along with the measurement of results. Many physical locations are now equipped with an increasing number of cameras with video management systems (VMS) to monitor and manage records of activities from people and things alike for investigation and compliance needs. More recently, cloud and fog computing environments are This ESG Solution Showcase was commissioned by Dell EMC and is distributed under license from ESG. © 2017 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Solution Showcase: Dell EMC: Simplify Digital Transformation with Enterprise IoT for Improved Business Outcome

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helping organizations extend these worlds, facilitating data movement and ubiquitous implementation of policies. This idea of trying to combine physical (operational technology or OT) and digital (information technology or IT) has been discussed for quite some time now. What is different today is that it has become simpler, more feasible, and less costly to bring these two worlds together. The speed of digitizing the physical environment, ease of cloud deployment, and microservice application development architecture have contributed to this acceleration of blending OT and IT. Indeed, the lines between OT and IT are blurring. For instance, many core business system customers, such as the users of SAP and Microsoft, are realizing that if organizations were to fulfill the promise of digital transformation with IoT, data must seamlessly connect to back-end systems that have the real-time analytical capabilities of structured and unstructured data. In other words, the shop floor in a manufacturing facility must be connected in real time to the top floor, or the data from “things” must be connected to business or historical data. Specifically, IoT events or signals generated in a manufacturing plant can only be put into proper context for real-time analytics when combined with information about the shortage of goods or materials that aren’t selling despite deep discounting from the inventory management system. Freshness of IoT is key. Data collected from sensors on a manufacturing plant’s production line or RFID devices embedded in a product in transport to a distributor must be used against aggregate inventory in minutes and hours before it becomes stale. In a world of disruption by competitors both old and new, an enterprise must ensure that the speed and response of business processes operate at the same speed of their data integration and analytics so the right action is taken at the right time. In addition, instead of manufacturing products in large lots, winning manufacturers are moving to real-time product customization where a sale comes before manufacturing, not the other way around as is the norm.

Business Mandates for IoT-enabled Digital Transformation IoT-enabled digital transformation is fundamentally the attempt to modernize and upgrade the capabilities of technology for “business”. ESG research identified frequently stated business goals for IoT initiatives, shown in Table 1. 1 Operational efficiency is most frequently cited but followed closely by better customer service, innovation around offerings, and even creation of entirely new business models.

Table 1. Business Goals for Enterprise IoT Initiatives How would you best characterize the anticipated impact of IoT on your organization? (Percent of respondents, N=501, multiple responses accepted). Desired Impact

Survey Response

Become more operationally efficient Provide better and more differentiated customer service Develop new innovative products and services Develop entirely new business models

45% 39% 38% 26% Source: Enterprise Strategy Group, 2017

In implementing this model, the first step is to solve the challenges of ingesting data at the edge and integrating it with data at the core. A lot of this has to do with data movement and management, and figuring out how to reuse the infrastructure and expand it from purely mechanical to intelligent. The second step is to understand that data by leveraging analytics techniques like deep learning and machine learning. These are now real tools, built on data platforms that are economical and powerful enough to support the needed scale. The third step is to close the feedback loop by 1

Source: ESG Research Report, 2016 IT Spending Intentions Survey, February 2016. All ESG research references and charts in this solution showcase have been taken from this research report. © 2017 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.


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pushing trained and tested analytics models back out to the edge where they can process live data and react locally. Selecting the core, edge, and cloud architecture accelerates “time to value,” and helps organizations rapidly move from proof-of-concept (POC) and prototypes to on-premises, enterprise-grade production deployments. In addition, ESG research in 2016 found that 46% of businesses reported having IoT initiatives in production or planned for launch within 12 months. Ideally, a strategic plan should be custom fit to the individual use case—one size doesn’t usually fit all that well. Selecting an adaptable, extensible architecture generates many possibilities for each industry vertical (manufacturing, energy, consumer goods, transportation, etc.) and for each line of business function (marketing, sales, research and development, etc.). This also includes an opportunity for a company to go from one vertical to another in extending offerings using its footprint and ecosystem.

How to Build an Enterprise IoT Environment New approaches are needed to fully integrate IT and OT, drive better outcomes through real-time event correlations, and provide capabilities for edge processing, advanced analytics, and data lifecycle management. The ability to provide an immediate and optimal response to changing conditions may also benefit from predictive analytics models based on a longer historical view. ESG research respondents’ biggest functional challenges in collecting data for IoT initiatives are shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Biggest Challenges Around Collecting Data for Enterprise IoT Initiatives When you consider all of the data your organization collects or will collect as part of IoT initiatives, which of the following would you consider to be the biggest challenge from a technology perspective? (Percent of respondents, N=501) Storing the data, 6% Governing the data (i.e., applying corporate and regulatory compliance policies), 12%

Transmitting the data, 5%

Securing the data, 24%

Protecting (i.e., backing up) the data, 13% Analyzing the data, 16%

Integrating the data (i.e., combining multiple data sources for analysis), 24%

Source: Enterprise Strategy Group, 2017

Much of the value actually comes from integrating and analyzing the data and, in many cases, organizations can drive value progressively if they can overcome the challenges. In light of the market concerns about hacking and intrusion, almost a quarter of respondents (24%) highlight the challenge of securing IoT data. The rest of these functions are more about managing the environment (transmitting, storing, governing, and protecting the IoT data), and having the right architecture plays a significant role. Therefore, a good place to start building an enterprise IoT solution is with a robust central platform where most data integration and heavyweight analysis will take place. Begin with infrastructure choices that will meet the demands of IoT at the core, including scalability, performance, reliability, and availability. Unless you feel strongly about a single vendor, this © 2017 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.


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should be an open and flexible platform, as there isn’t much to be gained from a narrow, vertical approach (except vendor lock-in). No one company offers everything in a technology stack spanning from machine sensors to machine learning. So look to adopt an infrastructure provider with a fit for purpose components with a large, growing ecosystem instead. Once you have a core hardware platform, customization for your business activities will then come in the software running there. Where possible, leverage a marketplace for ready-to-run applications, and only build more specialized capabilities as needed. This will achieve a faster time to value and lower ongoing development and maintenance efforts. Quite a bit of the action is still out on the edge. A complete solution must link these environments, not only via the physical networking and gateways, but also conceptually in the interplay between remote and central activities. Figure 2 shows some of the activities and issues from a functional point of view:

Figure 2. Common IT Solution Design Considerations

EDGE

Source: Enterprise Strategy Group, 2017 • Edge Processing - Transactions will occur on devices, and the information generated by this must be fed back into the

core. A solution needs to be scalable enough to accommodate large numbers of devices and exponentially more data points. • Edge Analytics - While analytics at the core may have a more holistic view, response often needs to be more

immediate or occur when disconnected from the core. These real-time analytics and deep learning should be fast and fit the local needs. • Edge Retention and Archive - Many think of IoT data as transient, but keeping the right information for later analysis

and audit is also important. Solutions should both help differentiate the significant data from noise and be able to hold it during disconnected operations, sometimes due to gateway or network interruptions.

© 2017 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.


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• Core Industry Applications - Again, many applications are now available off the shelf, but these utilize the aggregated

edge data to manage the environment as a whole. Look for packages that are designed “for purpose.” • Core Business Applications - Not every IoT application is specific to a particular domain; instead, they might be aligned

to a common line of business function. Find tools that meet the needs of the users and their workflows. • Core Analytics - The core of IoT is built on big data and machine learning technologies, which have become mature in

recent years. These leverage all available data to explore and model patterns over the long term. AI and deep learning capabilities are now also coming into play. Here, model accuracy is critical, but the technology must also determine corner cases and handle the unexpected. All analytics should be querying the edge and applying new learnings back out. • Security and Access Applications - Though commonly centered in the core, security and access controls must actually

span the entire environment.

How Dell Technologies and Dell EMC Fit These Requirements Having already noted that no single company can deliver all the hardware and software needed to build a complete IoT technology stack, it’s still not desirable to assign every component to a different vendor. The complexity of integrating everything would be stunning, to say nothing of support. A helpful recommendation is to look at the environment as supporting the analytics and applications, then see who can provide the most complete (and versatile) infrastructure platform. When the problem is approached this way, Dell EMC quickly emerges as a leading company with the broadest infrastructure portfolio. Dell EMC has always offered a strong platform for the core data centers. EMC came to the enterprise market with components like Vblock Systems, VxRack Systems, VxRail Systems, and other Dell EMC products (including specialized offerings like Dell EMC Isilon). These technologies were widely utilized in big data and video management software (VMS) solutions for central data analysis, model building, and the like, underlying custom/industry apps, business apps, analytics, and security/access apps (see Figure 2). Similarly, Dell PowerEdge servers were widely used to support both applications and big data in data centers around the world. Now, as EMC and Dell have merged, the combined range of IoT solutions expands readily to edge with Dell’s Edge Gateways and PowerEdge servers tied locally to sensors and operational technology. EMC’s VxRail Systems can also play an important role, acting as aggregation points for additional processing and archival in many edge environments. Networking connects the core and edge environments to collect and aggregate data. Dell Edge Gateways can also be used as scale points as the number of devices and data attributes grow. Dell EMC fabric, with spine-leaf configurations, brings networking scalability without undue management complexity. Outside of the customer firewall are useful expansions to PaaS and IaaS clouds. The Dell EMC Native Hybrid Cloud Platform can be a fast and flexible path forward for analytics and application development. This turnkey enables digital transformation, accelerating time to market and enhancing customer experiences. The Dell EMC converged solution and platform solution has a defined portfolio that meets organizations at their levels of maturity, budget, culture, and vendor risk appetite. Included in this portfolio is the Analytic Insights Module, a fully-engineered solution providing self-service data analytics with cloud-native application development into a single hybrid cloud platform, eliminating the months it takes to build your own. Complementing that approach, the Virtustream managed service offers smooth portability of applications to the optimal environment for the workload.

© 2017 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.


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Enterprise IoT Is an Ecosystem Play Again, enterprise IoT implementations will be multi-vendor in nature. To be successful in IoT, vendors will need productive partnerships, both in terms of technology alliances and go-to-market sales and services channels. Buyers should weigh their prospective vendors not just on their own products but on how inclusive they are with other players. Dell EMC has tight connections to many other pieces of the puzzle, big and small, that will be necessary to build a complete technology stack for IoT. Relevant examples here include such diverse partners as Microsoft, SAS, SAP, Splunk, Oracle, Cloudera, Hortonworks, Arrow Connect, OSIsoft, and WirelessGlue. These partnerships allow for deep additional functionality building above and beyond the Dell EMC infrastructure, and can be better illustrated with the following examples.

Surveillance Solutions Surveillance data has many applications in the enterprise, such as safety, security, and even quality control. Surveillance provides live and historical monitoring of activities both routine and suspect. This can take a number of forms, again spanning both physical and digital planes. Popular instances of surveillance for security include police body camera data, case/incident management, intrusion detection, and discrete sensors used for situational awareness. All of these capture real-world events and transform them into structured and unstructured datasets suitable for analysis. Dell EMC enterprise IoT solutions then process this data in the ways already described, but third-party software tools provide capabilities like tagging videos, running facial recognition, building access logs, or managing street traffic. Likewise, Dell EMC surveillance solutions can work with SAP and others around cases like manufacturing and predictive maintenance, integrating video with databases and production workflows. This helps to spot patterns and find insights on quality issues, even suggesting possible resolutions. Other vendors’ tools could also be part of the solutions, such as using SAS for machine learning running Vblock Systems with Dell EMC Isilon storage. For a technology validation of this OT and IT convergence around surveillance solutions, you can read more here.

SAP While IT and OT solutions can feel like different worlds, it’s the specific use cases that bridge the gap. As noted, while the infrastructure can be universal, the industry applications are typically very specialized. SAP is gaining a lot of traction due to the company’s long focus on applications that fit the workflows of each operator’s role. There are SAP modules for finance, HR, sourcing and procurement, supply chain, manufacturing, etc. If a goods producing company wanted to update everything from its assembly line to its logistics, it could do so with new interfaces between the physical and digital and in every location it operates. And Dell EMC enterprise IoT solutions could mirror that SAP deployment, underlying the applications with the platforms needed to make them run swiftly and reliably.

The Bigger Truth Bringing IoT into your digital transformation can be a significant multiplier for your business, monetizing your existing ecosystem to drive new revenue streams, and creating a sustainable competitive advantage that exploits your core strengths—be it for technology, brand, ecosystem, or geographical reach. To succeed in an IoT-enabled digital transformation initiative, you need a robust, versatile, and open infrastructure with fit-for-purpose solutions to choose from. This approach serves as a foundation to deliver against IoT initiative requirements, from starting a new project to layering a variety of business use cases that can scale across the enterprise, while breaking down silos. Edge processing capabilities are important for local and low-latency response in seconds and minutes. Edge on-premises computing empowers organizations to choose what data to analyze locally, save, and send to core via gateways. Systems in the core data centers can perform big data and analytics powered by AI and deep learning with an enterprise-wide repository of data spanning from weeks to years of record. © 2017 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.


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Dell EMC has the broadest infrastructure portfolio for you to create a scalable environment and build applications with confidence to transform business in the networked economy. Dell Technologies and its partner ecosystem significantly extend the reach of Dell EMC from the data center core to the operational edge across private and public clouds. Thanks to cloud deployment, application development, and crowd-sourced business models, the technological effort for transforming business that used to take years and months is now taking weeks and days. Taken altogether, the Dell EMC solutions will enable you to take an outcome-driven approach and rapidly turn your new ideas into solutions and business results through digital transformation exploiting IoT.

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