Dell: Robots and drones to drive the cloud market in next decade

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Robots, drones and driverless vehicles will propel the next decade of growth in the cloud computing industry, according to a Dell executive.

In an interview with Techgoondu at the Cloud Asia 2014 conference last week, Martin Yates, strategic enterprise practice director at Dell Asia-Pacific and Japan, said the increased processing power delivered over the cloud will offer unlimited possibilities in advanced automation.

“You’ll see an acceleration of cloud computing in areas like drones,” he said, noting that companies like DHL and Amazon are already using or experimenting with drones to deliver packages.

More companies will also use telephone answering agents powered by computers that understand natural language to run support hotlines and solve problems for customers, Yates said. “You won’t know if you’re talking to a computer or a human,” he added.

Driverless vehicles have also become a reality, with Singapore starting its first public trial of driverless buggies last month. As they are no longer in the realm of science fiction, Yates noted that it is a question of when such vehicles will become commonplace within a decade.

On how Dell is riding on trends in advanced automation, Yates said while the company does not build drones and robots, it offers a suite of products and services to support organisations in building new applications.

Cloud robotics is an emerging field of robotics that takes advantage of cloud services and storage, as well as other Internet technologies centred around the benefits of converged infrastructure offered by vendors like HP and Dell.

Robots can benefit from the powerful computational, storage, and communications resources of modern data centres available through the cloud, which means they will not need as much computing power onboard as before.

Earlier this year, RoboEarth, a European Union funded project to power robots using cloud technologies – allowing them to learn new skills and knowledge from each other – started testing robots in a hospital setting at Eindhoven University in the Netherlands.

And last year, over 15 healthcare institutions in Singapore bought Rowa Vmax robots from Germany to dispense and pack medicine in a bid to reduce patient waiting time and improve patient safety.

Robotics experts are expecting robots to become more prevalent in homes within a decade.