Major enterprise tech companies are learning to adopt to the new edge persona.

The migration of compute to internet-of-things devices spread far and wide outside of the data center has influenced enterprise IT providers, such as Dell Technologies Inc., to cultivate different customer relationships.

“We are Dell, so we have the luxury to be able to interview hundreds of customers that just now try to connect the OT with the IT together; what we learned is that the edge is different personas,” said Pierluca Chiodelli (pictured, left), vice president of engineering technology for edge computing offers, strategy and execution at Dell. “The person that decides what to do at the edge is not the normal IT administrator, is not the normal telco. It’s, for example, the store manager. It’s, for example, the person that’s responsible for the manufacturing process. Those people are not technology people by any means, but they have a business goal in mind.”

Chiodelli spoke with theCUBE industry analysts Dave Vellante and David Nicholson at MWC 2023, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. He was joined by Dan Cummins (right), fellow, vice president and chief technologist of edge computing at Dell EMC, and they discussed how customers are embracing new IT frameworks at the edge. (* Disclosure below.)

Democratizing the edge

Customer business goals are closely tied to data, and clients are looking to derive as much value as possible from information generated at the edge. The problem, according to Chiodelli, is that this has resulted in silo creation, which ultimately hinders progress.

“To me, the edge is a pre-virtualization area,” Chiodelli said. “Before there was virtualization, everybody was starting a silo. The edge is a new market, very exciting but very siloed. We are here to democratize the edge, to secure the edge and to expand.”

Dell’s expansion plans can be seen in the company’s work with partners such as Broadcom Ltd. to focus on speed and scale in connectivity hardware. Through initiatives such as Project Frontier, Dell intends to democratize the edge by leveraging advances in systems design. Dell launched Project Frontier in October as an operations software platform designed to scale up edge computing. The initiative uses an open framework to support any type of software application or multicloud environment, with the goal of eliminating constraints in edge environments.

“What’s different about the edge is the different computing locations and the constraints that are on those locations,” Cummins said. “In a far edge environment, the people that service that equipment are not trained in IT. So, you necessarily can’t apply the same IT techniques when you’re managing infrastructure and deploying applications. Frontier was designed to solve for those constraints.”

The distributed nature of edge computing networks has led to additional concerns about security. Dell is addressing the issue through secure device onboarding, one of the key features released last fall for Project Frontier.

“We as a manufacturer can initialize roots of trust in the Dell hardware, such that we can validate tamper protection throughout the supply chain and securely transfer ownership,” Cummins said. “That is not an IT technique; that’s an edge technique.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the MWC 2023 event:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for MWC 2023. Neither Dell Technologies Inc., the primary sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE