The new offering is the first of what will be a family of Dell Technologies manufacturing edge solutions, while the upgraded one is a new version of the Dell EMC Streaming Data Platform.

Today, as the virtualized 2021 version of Dell Technologies World kicks off, the major news item is the availability of the first offerings in the company’s APEX as-a-service portfolio. That’s fitting, since APEX is of enormous importance to the company, and will restructure the way in which it operates in multiple ways. Dell Technologies is, however, making another series of major announcements around their edge strategy today, which deserve not to be submerged by the APEX wave.

“We really believe the edge is the next frontier,” said Varun Chhabra, Vice President, Product Marketing for Product, Solutions and Portfolio Marketing at Dell Technologies. “More and more resources are being moved to the edge, and we are seeing this in customer conversations regardless of workload.”

Gartner says that more than 50% of enterprise-generated data will be created and processed outside the data centre or the cloud by 2022. Dell is responding to this growing demand with a pair of solution announcements, and with a focus on a customer relationship that the company thinks is indicative of the collaborative efforts needed to win in this space.

“We are announcing a brand new release of the Dell EMC Streaming Data Platform, for storing and processing streaming data from edge devices,” Chabbra said. This enhanced version of the platform provides a smaller footprint than before, purposing it better for space-constrained locations.

“Customers can take advantage of its faster insights to better deal with the growth of data at the edge,” Chabbra indicated. “The platform is built to handle the unlimited scale that we believe you will see with edge infrastructure in the future. This one unified platform integrates seamlessly with existing Dell EMC storage solutions, and we think this will unlock a lot of edge value for customers.”

The second edge announcement is a brand new offering, the first of what will be a series of Dell Technologies manufacturing edge solutions. It is the Dell Technologies Manufacturing Edge Reference Architecture with PTC, which helps manufacturing companies derive insights from workstations, computers, mobile devices and other endpoints within the manufacturing environment.

“These are interoperable edge solutions for smart factories, which simplify deployment for smart manufacturing,” Chabbra said. “This first one partners with software vendor PTC. It is built on the APEX private cloud for speed and scalability.” This provides a high-availability edge framework as-a-Service, so companies can virtualize and containerize applications, removing complexity and saving time.

The third part of the edge announcement is really a customer case study, highlighting the way in which Duos Technologies used Dell’s edge infrastructure, including ruggedized Dell EMC PowerEdge servers and Dell EMC PowerVault storage arrays, in a solution that allowed them to inspect railcars 120 times faster. They were able to move from taking eight minutes per car using traditional methods to inspecting over 120 cars, moving at full speed, in the same time period.

“The Duos Technologies announcement really shines a light on our momentum at the edge, in the way they redefined rail safety and prodictivity,” Chabbra said.