Edge computing market evolution

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Posted by Ana Juan Ferrer, Head of NG Cloud Lab, Atos Research and Innovation

 

Edge computing enabling technologies are one of the most important opportunities for existing IT technology providers and emergent ones. Gartner estimates that “Currently, around 10% of enterprise-generated data is created and processed outside a traditional centralized data centre or cloud. By 2022, Gartner predicts this figure will reach 50%”. In terms of market size, analysts measure the market growth in “6.72 USD Billion by 2022 at a Compound Annual Growth Rate of 35.4%”.

mF2C project was conceived in 2016, starting its execution January 2017. During this period the Edge computing market (including Fog) evolution has been very significant. In fact, in this period, we have witnessed the emergence of this now fully-flagged market. Edge computing in this period has been able to make the leap from an incipient academic and research area to one of the major IT trends for the coming years accounting with prominent market developments in major providers.

Although these significant developments, Edge market is yet far of being a consolidated market. The complexity of offerings which today are starting to be tagged as Edge computing is significant, and starts to be recognised.

Edge computing market entitles diverse market actors that have they say in providing Edge computing products and services. These range from system integrators, cloud major providers, hardware and software vendors, telecom operators and more. Examples of this Edge market actors are part of the mF2C consortium with industrial actors such as: Atos, SIXSQ, Intel, Wordsending and Engineering .

In Atos we have produced an analysis of the Edge computing market, with the objective to provide an overview of existing market developments and to determine Edge offerings categories. In this classification we identify the following existing segments:

  • Consumer Edge: It represents vendors in the field of consumer electronics subject to address the opportunities that Edge computing brings by embedding (or making interact) Edge intelligence into their devices.
  • Software Edge: These are vendors, mainly major cloud providers, whom offer software platforms to be used in conjunction with their IoT Cloud services and installed in Edge devices provided by the user.
  • Hardware Edge: Under this category we present actual hardware device vendors which are including as part of their products the development or packaging of software tools which enable Edge workload management.
  • Born at Edge: While all the previous categories refer to existing vendors who are in different manners extending or adjusting their existing products or services to cover the Edge market spectrum, here we refer to specialised Edge computing vendors which offerings only focus in this market.
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mF2C offerings clearly fall into the Software Edge category and we are working in a whitepaper that compares mF2C framework with related offerings in major providers such as AWS IoT Greengrass,  Azure IoT Edge and VMware Pulse. If you find this of interest, stay tuned and follow our progress!