75% of enterprise data expected to be processed on the edge by 2020

Industry experts participating in the Edge Computing Congress shared their views on how and when enterprises can benefit from edge computing.

Vodafone believes the market is quickly evolving from a centralised cloud to distributed cloud, expecting 75% of enterprise generated data will be processed outside of a centralised data centre by 2020.

This year’s Edge Computing Congress is being held in west London, where stakeholders on the value-chain are bouncing ideas off each other on how edge computing will impact the industry and how to capture opportunities brought about by the evolution of computing from the centre to the edge.

In a recent Telecoms.com Intelligence report, we predicted that 5G will help push edge computing from a small group of early adopters to be embraced by a much larger number of companies. This prediction is largely confirmed on Day 1 of the conference.

According to Vodafone’s data, shared by Simon Withers (pictured), the company’s Head of Digital Solutions Design, 27% of businesses are already implementing edge, and a further 18% plan to do so in the next year. The operator also predicted that, as a result of the trend towards edge cloud, 90% of customer deployments will be critically dependant on latency and bandwidth, the key technology properties 5G will offer.

To serve the fast-moving market, Vodafone is pursuing a multi-cloud strategy and is offering enterprise customers with two different solutions: dedicated and distributed. Withers also shared a few use cases the operators is working on with its partners, including supporting connected factory with dedicated edge, next generation retail with augmented reality on the edge, and worker insights through augmented operation.

Edge computing does not have to wait for 5G to happen. One of the most broadly adopted edge computing cases is private LTE for campus, for enterprise, etc. Yet this is an area that has become controversial to telecom operators. A representative from another big European operator believed private LTE, and in the future private 5G, may prove a new business opportunity for mobile operators if it is a network slice bought from the generic mobile network.

It would be a challenger if it was operated independently—for example the discussion in Germany that 5G frequencies could be awarded locally to private networks. However what worries the operator the most, according to the representative, is the webscale companies (AWS, Google, Microsoft) getting frequencies and offering services on the edge. This is already happening. Amazon has filed to FCC to expand its test on 3.5GHz band and, as Light Reading reports, this could be related to Amazon’s plan to “offer cloud-native, private mobile networks in the CBRS band to developers, telecom operators, public sector operators, enterprises and others.”

Another sign that there still lacks consensus on edge computing presented itself when a straw poll was conducted on the conference participants by the speaker from STL Partners, a consulting firm. When asked to choose the leading benefit of edge computing, two came on top, both at 25%, which are “enabling low-latency applications” and “data localisation, security and sovereignty”. Reducing connection cost to the central cloud, which the presenter expected to be high on the list, and we highlighted in our recent report, came joint last, selected by only 5% of the conference attendees.