What Buyer and Seller Experts Think of Edge Computing

How would experts on both the buyer and vendor/seller side see edge computing evolution? I had an opportunity to ask a half-dozen in each of these two groups what they believed would, could, and should happen. The results were very interesting.

The first question, obviously, is “What is edge computing”, and all my experts had fairly consistent views on the question at the high level. Edge computing is the deployment of compute resources close to a point of transactions or events. In a sense, it’s decentralization, something that seems to fly in the face of some of the past priorities, such as server consolidation. As we’ll see, that contradiction causes some discomfort.

The second question is “What justifies edge computing”, and experts gave IoT as the answer by almost a 2:1 margin. This dodges the server consolidation contradiction by linking edge computing to an application set that wasn’t responsible for server distribution to start with. In other words, past IT practices (and mistakes) were related to how transaction processing or productivity support for workers (empowerment) was handled, and edge computing is different because of the IoT mission.

Those who didn’t have that view were largely (all but 1) on the vendor/seller side, and this group believed that edge computing was a response to latency-sensitive applications in general. This group was admitting to the possibility that edge computing might be applied to transaction processing and empowerment applications, which clearly wasn’t what the users were willing to buy into.

One reason for this is that vendor/seller (cloud provider) people have seen the way that functional/lambda computing is applied to what’s effectively a GUI in social media applications, and recognize that this application would be potentially valuable to support workers. Prospective edge buyers generally have not seen these applications, and thus haven’t really thought about whether they might promote edge deployment.

The third question, which is “Where would the edge deploy?”, resulted in even less consensus. Users/buyers thought by a 4:2 margin that the edge would deploy on their premises, and vendors/sellers believed the opposite by a 5:1 margin.

To me, the user/buyer perspective was simply a reflection of how they saw IoT evolving. Most IoT applications already have local controllers deployed, and most user/buyer organizations are reluctant to push a critical piece of IoT out of the space they can control, over a network connection they’re not convinced is reliable, and into the hands of a player they may have little or no experience with. All of the buyers who wanted the edge on their premises said that they also believed that latency control with a “remote edge” was problematic because they had no idea what latency such a configuration would generate.

The vendors, even those representing IT elements that could figure in an edge deployment, were cagey about why they felt the edge would not be on the user premises. With some discussion, I got the impression that the big problem with that was too much application exposure in the value proposition that would have to drive sales. You could sell gear today to a cloud provider or telco who wanted to get into the edge computing business, basing your sale largely on media-driven “market trends”. Actual users meant linking the edge to an application, and making what started to look and sound like a one-off consultative sale to every prospect, which obviously no seller wants to get involved in.

I wanted to dig a bit on this point, which led to my next question, “Is there a generalized edge computing market somewhere off-premises?” For this, after some clarification of what that meant, only one user in six said “Yes” and all the vendor/sellers said “Yes”. I think that here again we see the IoT mindset of users/buyers in play. They see IoT applications as justifying their own edge elements, because the “edge” would be close to the IoT sensors and controllers or they wouldn’t be “edge”. Vendors/sellers, recall, see themselves selling to or offering generalized IoT, so naturally they believe there’s a market for it.

Do they really, though? When you press vendors/sellers for details on how edge computing will be used rather than sold, you find that 4:2, they believe that “applications” will build the edge business case for buyers, and that IoT will likely be the application that does most of the heavy lifting. They also believe that the buyers will have to drive the applications. The two with a different view thought that integrators would be the vehicle that linked user/buyer applications to generalized edge hosting. The one user who believed there was a generalized edge market also thought that integrators would make the application connection.

To me, it’s clear that vendors/sellers of edge technology are hoping for the classic “Field of Dreams”, but interestingly, the cloud providers here are the bridge in attitude. They believe that without an offering in place, there will be no buyer consideration of edge-in-the-cloud services. Thus, they’re taking the lead in publicizing edge capability, knowing that their commitment of resources can be timed with the pace of developing opportunity.

How long might it take for edge computing to become a reality? Here we had another separation based on buyer versus seller. Among buyers, the majority thought edge computing would come about somewhere between late 2022 to mid-2023. Among sellers, it was early to mid-2022, meaning about a year. I don’t think this means much beyond that sellers are always more optimistic about adoption than buyers are, but it might also be because buyers see that specific application connection with IoT, and thus are linking edge computing to a significant advance in their own IoT usage. Sellers see (or hope for) somebody to build edge computing and expect comers to evolve naturally.

My last question relates to the role of the cloud provider, and I found this really interesting. All the vendor/sellers, even ones that I’d have expected to hope for end-user deployment, thought that the cloud providers would be the dominant players in the edge space. Among buyers, it was only 2:4 in favor of the cloud.

I again attribute this to the IoT mission-centricity of buyers. Despite what the cloud providers would like you to believe, and would like to believe themselves, the majority of buyers don’t see the cloud as playing a major role in IoT. Transportation obviously would likely have a different view, but across most verticals, IoT is still an in-house thing. That’s another reason for cloud providers to push their own edge vision; it primes the planning and awareness pump.

One interesting point is that two of the four anti-cloud buyer experts volunteered that while they didn’t see the cloud playing a big role, they believed their senior management had a different view. If senior management shifted those two, then the balance would be 4:2 in the cloud’s favor, which made me wonder whether the other two might also be influenced by senior management shifts.

Through all of these questions answers, there was a single thread, which is that the justification for edge computing, if you take it out of the users’ facilities, is extremely vague. Vendors have great hopes, which is true all the time for sellers. Users have a kind of cautious and watchful interest, but that’s all they can muster at this point. The net of this is that there’s not likely to be an edge explosion driven by business applications. What could happen is that edge computing off-premises could grow out of available edge hosting resources justified by something else.

There’s no “else” on the horizon other than 5G and O-RAN at this point. We don’t know exactly how and where O-RAN will be hosted, but we can be fairly sure it won’t be on enterprise premises. If public cloud providers, with or without partnerships with network operators for real estate, deploy edge computing for 5G, it’s there and ready to be exploited. If operators do it on their own, same effect. The future of the edge is the future of O-RAN, and all the edge proponents need to accept that reality and think about its consequences.