I traveled to Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas this week. It was my first business trip in years.
The purpose of my trip was to share a current update on Dell's advancement of their latest innovation: the Data Confidence Fabric (or DCF). The title of my talk was "Real-time Carbon Footprint Tracking through a Data Confidence Fabric."
Think of a DCF as a type of "trust overlay" for an edge fabric. A DCF doesn't stop edge data from flowing across a fabric; it simply annotates when and how trustworthy handling of that data occurs. This annotation results in an overall confidence score.
The idea of a Data Confidence Fabric surfaced nearly three years ago (I wrote about it here). Looking back now, one quote stands out from the article.
"We're entering the age of data valuation."
The article assumed that IoT sensor data would eventually travel to data marketplaces, and that a DCF would enable a higher price by adding "measurable trust" regarding the data's lineage.
At Dell Technologies World, we indeed described how environmental sensor data can be monetized by creating "trustworthy" statements about carbon emission savings. Trustworthy emissions statements can result in revenue generation in the form of carbon credit payments.
So indeed we are already seeing DCF technology being evaluated in support of monetization use cases.
The DCF technology was open-sourced by Dell to the Project Alvarium (LFEdge) community six months ago. The real-time carbon footprint tracking project is the first collaboration among Alvarium members.
For more detail about this collaboration, see the video below.
DT_ProjectAlvarium_25Apr2022.mp4 from Dean Dollery on Vimeo.
Steve
Dell Technologies Fellow