'The Internet of Things is like the Cloud 8 years ago' ... Boss of Dell's new IoT biz spills beans

Dell has created a new "Internet of Things" division, and launched its first product: a $500 gateway designed for industry. "The Internet of Things is like the Cloud was eight years ago," the division's executive director Andy Rhodes told El Reg. What, overhyped? Ambiguous? An obscene cash bandwagon? "There is a lot of buzz," …

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes

They are both a bad joke.

[JP19]

More getting ready for unknown things

"Asked about use cases" He came up with drivel.

Customers are going to let hotels location track them so they can make trivial savings turning off the heating the customer paid for anyway? Not that it has anything to do with an internet of things.

[Irongut]

Re: More getting ready for unknown things

Even worse: "Your phone could be your keycard of the future..."

Very useful when you get back to the hotel late at night after a long day and can't get into your room because your phone died.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: More getting ready for unknown things

Or, god forbid, you actually wanted a quiet night and left your behind.

Shudder, the thought of not being able to check in or send everyone yet another boring photo of a plate of food. The horror.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: More getting ready for unknown things

"Very useful when you get back to the hotel late at night after a long day and can't get into your room because your phone died."

Didn't you get the memo? Smartphones are soon going to be a one stop shop for just about every service and activity you could possibly do! Banking, shopping, taxis, transport, doors, driving your car, feeding the cat, etc etc because smartphones are like so totally hip and kool. Or something.

Which I'm sure is all great for the kids - except as you say if your phone has died or been stolen or you've broken it or lost it or left it in your jacket in the office or you've forgotten the password or its been hacked and so on. Because unfortunately these hipster marketing types don't seem to understand the meaning of the phrases "backup plan" and "if it ain't broke...".

[Mage]

$500 ?

For Hardware and Software with a different badge is $50, certainly under $100?

maybe because expensive Intel CPU and not a cheap MIPS SoC or ARM SoC like most routers have.

Or is it 19" rack mount, steel case and a built in UPS.

[Anonymous Coward]

$500 for a Celeron, the grocery-getter of CPUs?

Might be a new marketing gambit. "Proactive diminishing returns" or something equally as judicious.

[erikj]

"95 per cent of IoT data is useless"

Dell might think twice before assigning Mr. Rhodes to write brochure copy for their IoT gateway devices.

[John 104]

Re: "95 per cent of IoT data is useless"

95% of IoT data is useless. And will remain so, despite our pathetic attempt to enter the market"

And I say again, why are people so quick to spew their personal habits to the world?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "95 per cent of IoT data is useless"

"And I say again, why are people so quick to spew their personal habits to the world?"

I take it you've never heard of Facebook, Twitter and so on?

[Mark 85]

Re: "95 per cent of IoT data is useless"

So 5% is useful... I daresay that's the 5% that I wouldn't want to give them. Where's the "Death to the IoT" icon? I'll use what's close for now....

[zkysr]

Re: "95 per cent of IoT data is useless"

It is useless until you realize you need it later? More data always trumps sophisticated algorithms in analytical processing for making good decisions.

[Henry Wertz 1]

I've got no candy

So, you now have all this local processing power, storage, and RAM. So, praytell, why for any of the states iOt uses, should I send ANY information to a 3rd party? Even the "useful" 5% of it? Tenancy-based temperature control, the thermostat alone should have enough processing power I think... but this multi-ghz "gateway" definitely has way more than needed. Ligthing control? 3rd parties don't need access, and this doesn't take processing power either. Remote camera viewing (which has been done for a decade or more with IP cameras and DVRs, btw...), "plug and play" port forwarding, NAT punching, and manual port forwarding will ALL allow this with no 3rd-party access.

Oh, you WANT all that juicy info? Well, too bad, I've got no candy for you 8-)

[Cranky Yank]

Specs sound like a ChromeBox

And a ChromeBox can be had for under $160.

[kellerr13]

Clueless

He is completely clueless.

Only FOOLS use "the cloud", and the "Internet of things" has been met with a LOT of resistance because of privacy and security concerns.

Let the doctor's do the doctoring, the accountants do the accounting, and let us engineers do the engineering.

[Pascal Monett]

Re: Only FOOLS use "the cloud"

You're entirely right.

Unfortunately, fools make up 95% of the tech market.

This is one bandwagon that is NOT stopping anytime soon and, like blood in the water, the marketing sharks are already in a frenzy. The bonuses will be staggering.

And when the brown matter really starts hitting the revolving blades, they will safely retreat behind the old "but we didn't design the thing !" excuse, keeping their bonuses.

Doesn't matter. This is one game I'll be watching from the bleachers.

Or even not at all.

[Warm Braw]

"Bullish"

The word I was thinking of was similar, though not identical.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why? and why this?

We know there's no real answer to "why IoT" except that it fills column inches.

But why try to repurpose a thin client box? Maybe Wyse and Dell have some kind of legacy agreement where Dell are contractually obliged to spend $Xmillion/year with Wyse, and they haven't found a way to spend it, and this is the latest and most visible candidate?

As others have noted, a half decent SoHo router would be more than capable of doing this job for a quarter of the cost (or less). It would have the usual SoHo-gear problem of instant obsolence, but does that matter much here?

[DanielR]

Edgemax Lite $130 better value for money

My tiny edgemax lite only cost $130 also and runs less than 8w !

[DanielR]

JOKE

Celeron ! sounds like crap. Get an edgemax ! routing is fully hardware accelerated !

[F0ul]

So Dell decide to act all Novell and bring something totally out of proportion to the marketplace?

The insanity of companies not understanding IoT is mind blowing. You'd have thought we've seen this type of change happen so often, that it would be easier to work out what will happen?

For internet of things, think hardware equivalent of a class and an instance. Old school had a device which was a class. New school has IoT, which is your instance. It needs to be stupid cheap and does everything as virtually as it can. These will be like RFID's with enough processing power to do Docker.

The hardware will become so cheap it will be disposable. The clever money will be being able to take the data and do something new with it. Microsoft are already there with its various service bus options. IoT will be about messaging and big data processing. Who bought an R specialist recently?

Dell should focus on building nice looking ultra light laptops and damn good data centre servers because the rest of the market is going to disappear - in about 8 years!

[Hans 1]

Is the raspberry pi 2 not both faster and more power efficient than this thing ? I would think so, then again, 1.6Ghz Celeron without specifics .... Ok, the pi has less RAM, but who needs 4Gb RAM for IoT ?