Dell EMC Partners With FogHorn For Bundled IIoT Edge Solutions

Dell EMC is partnering with edge intelligence startup FogHorn to sell out-of-the-box industrial Internet of Things hardware and software bundles.

The collaboration, announced Tuesday, will provide Dell EMC partners with gateways and other edge devices preconfigured with FogHorn's Lightning edge intelligence platform, which features machine learning, automation and scalability capabilities. The bundled solutions will be available to partners through the Dell IoT Solutions Partner Program starting in December.

Dell EMC is not the first OEM to partner with FogHorn. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company already works with several other partners, according to Kevin Duffy, vice president of business development at FogHorn. They include Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Cisco and AdLink.

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Ron Pugh, the Americas head for Dell EMC OEM Solutions, said FogHorn's edge software enables Dell EMC's gateway and endpoint products to "become smart edge solutions by layering their edge intelligence directly into our hardware, driving insights at any point in their IoT deployments."

“With more than 75 billion IoT connected devices predicted to be installed by 2025, making technology to manage and process the data collected from these devices crucial,” he said in a statement.

Duffy told CRN that partners will have access to FogHorn's data science team to determine how to adapt the Lightning platform to specific operational processes for customers.

"Ultimately, this is a data transformation world that we live in. People talk about data, but that's just raw flat data. What you really need to do is you need to apply analytics and deep learning to that data to convert it to knowledge," Duffy said.

Keith Higgins, FogHorn's vice president of marketing, said FogHorn's software can give resellers high margins in an space that is seeing enormous growth right now.

"I think that the industrial IoT space is the largest emerging market opportunity on the planet right now," he said. "Those gateways need high-margin software, right? They need software that can help the resellers in their business model and give them a very unique value proposition."

FogHorn currently has more than 100 commercial deployments across customers in manufacturing, power and water, oil and gas, renewable energy, mining, transportation, healthcare and retail. The company also supports applications for smart grid, smart city, smart building and connected vehicle.

Founded in 2014, FogHorn has raised $47.5 million in capital from investors, including Dell, General Electric, Honeywell and Intel.