Dell Technologies announced plans to invest $1 billion in R&D as part of a new IoT effort, as the computing company looks to the segment to fuel further growth opportunities in cloud computing.

In a statement, Dell said it would form a new IoT division tasked with creating specific IoT products, laboratories and partner programmes, while deploying artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technology “to work in concert with IoT infrastructure”.

Dell, which traditionally operates as a personal computing hardware company, recently made a splash around corporate services including storage and security, and is now looking to build on a $60 billion acquisition of IT company EMC in 2016.

Capitalising on digital
The company said the push is being driven by a growing trend among its customers to digitally transform their businesses, with IoT at the heart of the ambition.

Dell explained while cloud computing was on the up for 15 years, the fact every type of product, from phones to cars and oil rigs, are now alive and intelligent means there is a growing requirement for real time processing of information.

“These devices simply cannot wait for a response from a centralised cloud infrastructure that may be seconds away,” Dell stated.

In an interview with Bloomberg, CEO Michael Dell (pictured) explained the company was also looking for fresh ways to attract customers, particularly those spending money on cloud-based computing services with rivals including Amazon and Microsoft.

Through IoT, Dell can develop hardware and software products which can be placed near a connected device to manage all the information created.

“Dell Technologies is leading the way for our customers with a new distributed computing architecture that brings IoT and AI together in one, interdependent ecosystem from the edge to the core of the cloud,” the CEO explained in the statement.

The new unit will be headed up by Ray O’Farrell, CTO at Dell subsidiary VMware.