Edge Computing - How to Find Demand?

Edge computing will happen. All vendors, operators, public cloud, and telecom, agree. How come then it is so hard to understand how it first appears and when, where, why it starts to grow? Being able to answer this question is "the" question all people ask. Why then is it so hard to capture, if there is no doubt of its existence?

The purpose of this article is to answer this question and then provide a new lens to study the market, one aligned to the needs of the demand side rather than the needs of the supply side.

Two Ways to View the Market

Supplier First

You should assume this is 100% of the edge related discussion. All suppliers, irrelevant of whether they are vendors or operators, have now successfully adopted cloud and cloud-based operations. For the first time, there is a continuum of programmable accessible infrastructure end-to-end. However, along that continuum, there is different ownership, governance, and perspective on the addressable market. I believe Seamster.io has the simplest definition of this end-to-end reality.

Conversations are always anchored in one of the 4 edge types, either by vendors who want to sell more equipment or operators (both cloud and telecom) wanting to maximize possible addressable market. The combination of this leads to exponential combinations of opinions and definitions.

There has to be a better way and there is

Customer First

The alternative lens to view the market through is the demand side rather than the supply side. Viewing the world from this perspective captures the real-world needs in a way that is less self-serving from the cloud-based supplier side. This is the perspective used in Seamster.

All edge types have both benefits and drawbacks.

For a more detailed understanding to this thinking see here - "Framing the Edge Discussion".

Solutions will potentially span all 4 edges, for different reasons at different times - availability, presence, suitability, for example. Today the market is dominated by mobile applications that use the Device Edge and the Centralized Cloud Edge. This has worked exceptionally well to meet the needs of the existing experience requirements. The most important question is to understand why anybody needs anything different from today?

What is broken?

The answer is nothing. When there is change, there never tends to be anything broken. The challenge in crossing the chasm is to understand there is more opportunity on the other side. And for those that choose to not cross the chasm since it is not necessary today, are at some point left behind.

Over the last 20 years, there has been increasing sensor deployment. From many perspectives, the power of the smartphone is contained within the sensors that are present in the platform. Also, cars generate massive amounts of situational awareness data as do the traffic light networks they drive towards and the surveillance cameras watching both. Fast food restaurant kitchen equipment is fully instrumented, it just has not been turned on. There is too much data and no way to process it with today's architectures. All the information is valuable when it is translated into important trigger events that can then interact with other contextually important events, to create an automated response in the local environment and also a potential signal back. In cars they avoid crashes. In kitchens, they match food cooked to menu placement to customers entering.

The next generation of digital transformation in all enterprises will be the generation, capture, and near-real-time interpretation of asynchronous signals from heterogeneous business systems, enabling the generation of intelligent responses, in the moment, when they are needed and most valuable.

For assisted driving, this may prioritize public safety vehicles through busy traffic or avoid a crash between a car and cyclist at a busy intersection. For retail, this may enable pre-emptive staffing of checkout, prior to queues existing. For fast food, this may be dynamic menus matching what is already cooking in the kitchen to previously known orders by people. In all cases, the result is a hyper-personalized experience in the real world context and the opportunity to create a supply model that is demand chain-driven rather than supply chain constrained.

The Real Secret, Saved Until Last

We have heard all of the above before. The real secret to unlocking the potential of the future market is to look through the eyes of the independent software providers (ISVs) that are already digitally transforming their specific target markets and ask how they can be edge enabled in a highly repeatable, safe, trusted way.

Why is this the best lens?

These companies are not focused on which technology to use, they are focused on generating business outcomes for their enterprise customers. If they can generate more business outcomes with better results, then they succeed, their customers succeed and their suppliers succeed. But the suppliers are last, not first in terms of the hierarchy of importance.

• What business outcomes does the customer need?
• What supplier requirements do they enforce on the ISVs?
• What performance guarantees and assurance is required?
• What solution life cycle management guarantees are required
• What software architectures best enable such solutions?

Example - Multi-Modal Crash Avoidance System (MCAS)

Four such companies, Sfara, Solace, MobiledgeX, Accedian, have come together to create a traffic awareness and safety system that seamlessly scales to handling the millions of real-time events required to replicate the kind of safety systems already taken for granted in the airline industry.

The airline industry provides one of the safest modes of transportation in large part due to technology. That industry mandates the use of a Traffic Collision Avoidance System (TCAS) that uses transponders to share location data amongst planes to identify potential collisions.

On our roadways, where far more lives are at stake on a daily basis, we lack such a foundational and necessary safety mechanism. And yet, as the world works to overcome the challenges of autonomous transportation, a chaotic transition is already taking place. Cars from the 80s, 90s, and 2000s drive side by side with technologically advanced semi-autonomous and autonomous vehicles. That disparity will continue to grow into the foreseeable future.

One of the biggest challenges to realizing autonomous transportation is getting all modes of transportation to communicate with each other and with infrastructure.

MCAS creates an infrastructure that opens communication amongst all modes of transportation, including vehicles, bicyclists, pedestrians, and others, for beyond-line-of site collision avoidance and predictive trajectories.

Each partner brings a unique capability to the solution and due to the architecture seamlessly integrates together. Sfara connects mobile devices to enable MCAS, making the mode of transportation irrelevant. MobiledgeX creates localized cloudlets that allow MCAS data to work seamlessly across multiple heterogeneous network infrastructures. Solace provides the real-time event mesh that connects heterogeneous business systems and prioritizes MCAS data flow ahead of non-critical data. Accedian provides infrastructure and application performance, auditable telemetry, user attribution, as well as intrusion detection and forensics.

This design pattern repeats across and applicable to all edge-based solution spaces driving real-time awareness and industry digital transformation.

In essence, we’ve created for our roadways a safety infrastructure similar to that used in the ultra-safe airline industry. For more information on MCAS see here - "Smarter, Greener, Safer Cities and Roadways Technologically Enabled by MCAS".

Trial preparation is underway in multiple countries with mobile operators, with the hope of execution still this summer into fall.