Our industry is still in the process of clearly defining what and where “the edge” is, with multiple stakeholders both competing and cooperating in this high-stakes race. This makes openness and automation vital for service providers to successfully manage and deliver new edge cloud services to end-customers, says Rick Hamilton, Senior VP of Blue Planet.
How openness and automation help clear the hurdles to edge cloud services
Our industry is still in the process of clearly defining what and where “the edge” is, with multiple stakeholders both competing and cooperating in this high-stakes race. This makes openness and automation vital for service providers to successfully manage and deliver new edge cloud services to end-customers, says Rick Hamilton, Senior VP of Blue Planet. This summer, the world convened on a global stage to celebrate the Summer Olympic Games held in Tokyo, one of the most prestigious and celebrated sporting spectacles our planet has to offer. The Summer Olympics have a multitude of events, including wrestling, swimming, and fencing, but one of the most notable and exciting events is the 400m hurdles race. At the beginning of this race, runners line up at the starting blocks and wait in anticipation with the finish line in sight. At the fire of the starter’s gun, the runners explode into an all-out sprint, but to win the race, they must jump over a series of hurdles that lie in their path. The 400m hurdles event reminds me a lot of the race to own the edge for telcos. Today’s service providers have already left the starting blocks as the build out of edge cloud network infrastructure is already underway, looking to take advantage of their ongoing 5G deployments. According to Mobile Experts, over 4,600 edge data centers will be active worldwide by the end of 2021 alone. This new edge cloud infrastructure is needed to support a new generation of cloud-native applications that go beyond basic connectivity and help service providers deliver an on-demand digital experience, supporting use-cases such as business AR/VR, industrial automation, and gaming that are compute-intensive and latency-sensitive. Read more