Michael Dell: In the age of distributed cloud and big data, integration is key
As large organizations like the federal government move to more agile and distributed IT infrastructures underpinned by unprecedented volumes of data, integration will be crucial to using those tools to solve the world’s biggest problems, Michael Dell said Thursday.
“Integrated innovation is the key to the future of technology infrastructure,” Dell said before representatives of his company’s “biggest customer” — the federal government — at the Dell Technologies Forum on Thursday in Washington. “It is a multi-cloud world and data is everywhere and all of these technologies have to come together. And this is really the most important work we can do because the world is being transformed digitally.”
More and more federal agencies indeed are adopting hybrid- and multi-cloud environments and producing more data in a single day than they did in a full year about a decade ago. He believes that edge computing and Internet of Things (IoT) technology, in particular, will cause for even more of a data explosion.
“All physical objects are becoming intelligent, they’re becoming instrumented and they’re becoming connected and digitized and that is creating a stream of data that is enormous,” Dell said. “This new edge of computing is really encompassing everything in our world from homes to cars to buildings to any type of equipment, clothes — it’s everywhere in the world.”
Dell thinks this so-called edge computing “will be far bigger than the computing that we think of at the center in what you would refer to today as the cloud.”
“Whether it’s the public cloud, the private cloud or the hybrid cloud —all combined together, we think the edge will ultimately be larger,” he said, backing it up with some data. In 2007, he explained, all of the cellular data usage in the world amounted to 86 petabytes for the year. Today, the world uses 86 petabytes in 18 hours, he said. “That’s a pretty big change. … In 2030, it’ll be 86 petabytes in 10 minutes.”
Dell wants to use that technology to help his company’s customers, like the federal agencies, be “a great force for good” by democratizing technology and using it to “amplify human potential and advance human progress on a global scale.”
“How do we put this data to work to help the most people? It’s why we exist — to unlock the power of this data to solve the greatest challenges that are out there…and it has to be done in real-time,” he said. “We’re creating this future of infrastructure from the cloud to the edge and really with the goal of making your life simpler.”
