Ready to Accelerate Computer Vision? Hear from Willie Reed. GM of Safety, Security and Computer Vision at Dell Technologies.
Willie Reed:
Hi, my name is Willie Reed. I’m the General Manager for Safety, Security and Computer Vision and Dell Technologies. I want to thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today about Dell’s strategy around computer vision. I thought I’d open up with some major trends. I think it’s good to kind of anchor around some of these big trends that we’re seeing moving forward. I obviously the increase of AI is exploding and over 80% of the organizations expect the number of AI use cases to increase over the next two years.
Willie Reed:
We’re also seeing that organizations that are leveraging AI and scaling AI are seven times more likely to be in the fast growing businesses in their industries. 70% of organizations are actually bringing in data faster than they can analyze it, which is an opportunity to improve operational efficiencies loss. So we definitely want to help in that space. And then 83% of organizations are looking to create a diverse ecosystem of partners throughout their AI strategy.
Willie Reed:
So there’s not really one AI component, one infrastructure component, one element that’s going to solve all their needs. You have to be open in your approach and have a really valued ecosystem from that perspective. From an analytics maturity curve, we’re really in the third wave of this deployment. If you think about the first waves of kind of analyzing data and looking at historical data for insight, the descriptive and diagnostic phases of AI, we’ve been doing that for years telling us what happened and why did that happen?
Willie Reed:
And that’s still a very valuable part of AI, and it’s still a very valuable part of growing your business and growing that trend to understand how do I go and find new opportunities to improve efficiencies or safety or some of the other places there. In the past few years, we really focused on predictive. So how do I take AI and leverage to predict what’s going to happen? And we’ve seen a lot of great use cases across that, across a number of verticals, but the more exciting piece is what’s happening next, right? So how do we build learning models and how do we become prescriptive and optimize the opportunity to use data, to really understand how are we learning? How are we changing models? How are we changing behaviors based on real-time acceptance of data?
Willie Reed:
And I think that’s going to be a real shift for a lot of folks and how they run their businesses moving forward. The key to this though is where is that data being consumed? Where is that analytics occurring? And what happens is we see the trend of more analytics occurring closer to where the data is being captured closer to the edge. So within cameras, I now have cameras that can actually do compute and complex things and provide edge-based analytics without having data back to a central data center.
Willie Reed:
So I see greater value in doing analytics closer to the edge. I see an opportunity for improved safety, making decisions, sensing and thinking on the data to automate instances, reduce instances of human error. So good examples of that might be where I’m in a hospital setting and I’ve set up a safety zone for a patient or a fall zone for a patient getting out of a bed and can leverage a camera to say, “Hey, I can sense that that person’s moving or moved out of that bed.”
Willie Reed:
Same thing on a factory floor, “Hey, I’ve got a worker that’s kind of moved too close to a piece equipment. We want to take an active set off a sensor, set off an alert on their vest or on on their phone or something like that. You need to move away.” Those are great examples of where the edge is actually helping to process and move that data faster. It also helps me to reduce costs. The more I can compute, the more I can do the analysis closer, the less data I have to move back. And there’s really a concept around federated analytics of being able to have multiple endpoints, doing analytics at the edge, and then moving those results back to a central location.
Willie Reed:
The cost savings in that and not moving data back and forth is tremendous, as well as the operation efficiency that I would see in the gains of collecting data from multiple points and then doing my analysis across that environment. Tighter security is very important. We want to process data locally. It prevents it from having to travel or traverse across networks where that data becomes more vulnerable.
Willie Reed:
And then I want to make faster decisions. That’s really the importance of why the data needs occur where it occurs. So from a customer or consumer perspective, why is that all important? Those all sound great, but the reality is there’s really three areas where we see the value of what computer vision is delivering from an outcome perspective. The first is to remember that a lot of what we see in computer vision has been built up out of the safety and security space, out of what we’ve done in surveillance for a number of years is a good example.
Willie Reed:
The innovations that those manufacturers, camera manufacturers, the video management systems have developed within their tools has allowed us to continue to add and grow on top of those applications to provide more improved safety opportunity. So I can leverage a camera, for example, now that can have safety and security functionality within a store. It could also maybe take a look at foot pattern. It can maybe also take a look at inventory control. I don’t need to keep redeploying new sensors, new data. I can leverage that data in place, leverage those sensors in place and be able to improve on an infrastructure that I have already invested in.
Willie Reed:
But there’s also an element of computer vision that helps enhance people experience. And there’s a lot of different ways to think of that. I can look at this for better forecasting for staffing. In this example, we talk about here is around the transportation industry, potentially line queuing, especially these days with people getting back to travel and maybe steering people to shorter lines through a particular gate at a venue or a particular checkpoint at security. Computer vision can help automate and enhance people’s experiences as they’re living their lives.
Willie Reed:
And then the third area is really achieving operational efficiencies in improving sustainability. This is probably the most exciting of what we’re seeing transpiring now is leveraging cameras to help make decisions closer to the edge that are going to improve operational efficiency. We’ve seen this for years in the manufacturing space, production quality on a line and being able to move products very quickly through that line. And omitting those products that may not meet my product quality standards, but a lot of people won’t think about the impact to sustainability that something like that might have.
Willie Reed:
The ability for me to reduce a carbon footprint or the ability for me to impact using less energy through a process by leveraging computer vision is a huge opportunity for all of our customers combined to take part of. So how do you deploy this. What elements are we talking about? And the main thing that I would leave with you around kind of this environment is it’s not just the computer vision data. That is a very important part of it. It’s not just about what’s coming out of the camera, but there are a lot of different types of data that you’re going to interact with. Whether it’s video data or sensor data, LiDAR data, all different sources.
Willie Reed:
Sensor data is going to provide me an amalgamation of really what I want to see from an outcome depending on whether it’s public security or an intersection or something along those lines. Even down into, as we mentioned, manufacturing or retail in that space. We normalize that data. That’s a very important part of the process is bringing the data back, normalizing it and then providing it through kind of a learning and integration model that I can then provide back to my data pipeline.
Willie Reed:
Once I’m in my data services, this is where I’m providing visualization. This is where I’m providing the analytics. I’m providing the ability for me to change models or improve learning models. I’m cataloging that data and running it through that. Here’s where the importance of that enterprise scale feature at the edge is important. I need to be able to adapt and change. I need to be able to scale up and scale down. I need to be able to leverage something I can trust for all those applications and all that data coming in and then wrapper that infrastructure around what we do around cybersecurity. Protect that. Make it hardened so that people can’t take the data off offline or my decision processes that are occurring at the edge can’t be tampered with or what have you.
Willie Reed:
And then the last piece is around data governance and managing that platform, managing integrations. Again, I can leverage, as we mentioned, the safety and security environment as a starting point, but then I may want to build on top of that. So I want to manage my API, manage my integration features and continue to grow out. Again, that’s where the importance of having an enterprise scale infrastructure at the edge is very, very important.
Willie Reed:
So what does Dell do in this space? Providing reliable enterprise class, computer vision requires a number of features. So the first piece is the real-time compute in edge analytics. So you need to be able to have something that’s going to be in a form factor that fits the use case that you need that provides the power around whatever analytic or analytics engines you use. Because we often see customers using multiple computer vision platforms in their infrastructures.
Willie Reed:
So providing that opportunity for me to consolidate and maybe move to a singular converged infrastructure stack, for example, in a large deployment like an airport might provide me an opportunity to provide better streamline automation across that environment and how we manage things moving forward. It needs to be adaptable as well. So in that specific space I may want to continue to add new terminals. I may want to continue to add new functions or new use cases or new applications. That stack has to be flexible enough for me to move out.
Willie Reed:
It needs to be able to integrate with a multi-cloud. There’s a lot of value in moving data in and out of a cloud or moving certain parts of the applications like the management consoles or dashboards or things like that into a cloud-like environment. There’s also something to be said around consumption and how people are wanting to consume infrastructure at the edge versus kind of pay for play in that space. So integration not only into a multi-cloud environment, but into a cloud-like experience is absolutely critical and something that we’re developing today.
Willie Reed:
And the last piece around secure and resilient IT. We talked a little bit about cybersecurity. We talked about platform hardening. Those are very critical in how we deliver that infrastructure today. So our advantage, Dell delivers a robust partner ecosystem. We have partnered across the world with all the ISVs.
Willie Reed:
So what does Dell deliver in this space? One of the things we’ve prided ourselves on is the robust partner ecosystem we’ve built over the years of being the leader in enterprise class, compute and storage for the computer vision space. Not only the ISVs, but also the system integrators, the VAR channels, the community that it takes to develop and deploy these solutions is vital. And being able to make sure that we tested and validated those ISVs against that infrastructure is what makes Dell a trusted partner in that space.
Willie Reed:
We’ve aligned our end-to-end solution portfolio to be optimized for what’s happening in the computer vision space. So not just compute, storage, converge. It’s the hybrid cloud approach. It’s leveraging multiple products across the platform to address networking needs to address the needs of the endpoint devices. God, guys, I’m so sorry. I’m going to read you this slide one more time. I don’t know why I’m struggling with that one.
Willie Reed:
So what does Dell deliver in this space? The key to our advantages around our robust partner ecosystem, we’ve leveraged this ecosystem for the past 10, 20 years to really become a leader in this space and truly understand the workloads that we see around computer vision. We’re talking about the ISVs and making sure that the products are validated and certified and tested to fail so we understand how to properly size those environments for your needs. But it’s also the integrators and the OTSIs and the SIs, and delivery partners that help bring those outcomes to make them real.
Willie Reed:
The other thing is the lab I mentioned before is a very big differentiator from what Dell does. Making sure that we are aligning with all of our hardware partners, as well as the different products inside the organization to make sure that we have tested and validated the infrastructure to meet the needs of the computer vision workload. We’ve aligned that portfolio from an end-to-end perspective incorporating not just server and storage, but hyper-converge virtualization, hybrid cloud model modalities, as well as endpoint devices like gateways, embedded PCs, or even hardened laptops that I can leverage for visualization at the edge.
Willie Reed:
And lastly, again, our customers speak for themselves. We’ve got thousands of customers that deployed their computer vision infrastructure on top of Dell Technologies for years. And we’d be happy to put you in contact with anyone that you need to refer to in that space. So where can you get started or where does this journey start? So we have all this information available out on delltechnologies.com/safetyandsecurity.
Willie Reed:
There are Dell Technologies specialists around computer vision available for you. And then we also have demos, innovation centers, labs, proof of concepts, things like that that we can engage with you on that are all available at your fingertips just by leveraging these resources on this slide.
Willie Reed:
So again, I want to thank you for your opportunity today. I want to thank you for taking the time learning a little bit more about what Dell Technologies does and computer vision. I hope you have a wonderful afternoon and a great it. Thank you.
