How Developers Balance Speed and Quality
At the Mobile World Congress 2017 conference today, Dell announced an expansion of its gateways for Internet of Things (IoT) environments as part of a continuing effort to create demand for a turnkey approach to IoT platforms.
Rather than building and deploying a custom gateway, Dell is making the case for a standardized series of gateways based on Intel Atom processors that in turn connect to multiple sensors. Andy Rhodes, Dell vice president and general manager for IoT, says Dell is building a family of gateways that enable organizations to handle varying classes of IoT workloads.
“A lot of IoT projects are like snowflakes,” says Rhodes. “They all look alike until you put them under a microscope.”
Specifically, the new ruggedized Dell Edge Gateway 3000 Series, due out this summer, is a lower-end offering designed to complement an existing 5000 series. Priced at $399, Rhodes says the entire family of Dell gateways can be centrally managed via Dell Edge Device Manager software.
Most existing IoT gateways are based on some form of a “white box” customized for specific deployments. The degree to which organizations want to continue to engage in building those gateways themselves is debatable. In effect, Dell is betting that gateways will emerge as a massive commercial market, in much the same way traditional PCs and servers did over 40 years earlier. If that actually does happen, it may very well turn out that Dell will sell more gateways than PCs or servers by several orders of magnitude.
