5G, industry, and collaboration at the edge

Sponsored by: Red Hat The next wave of disruptive technologies will blend the physical and digital worlds, writes Chris Wright, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Red Hat. As a U.S. West Coast transplant living in New England, I’ve enjoyed exploring the White Mountains in New Hampshire. The highest peak – Mount Washington at 6,288 feet – is home to the “world’s worst weather.” In 1934, the mountain claimed the world record for fastest wind gust ever recorded at 231 miles per hour. In this environment, the technologist in me can’t help but consider the possibilities of edge computing in remote parts of the world, where big data center footprints and always-on connectivity are not typically found. Edge computing gives life to the transformative use cases that businesses are dreaming up today, bringing real-time decision making to last-mile locales. They could include a far-flung factory or a train, someone’s connected home, or their car on the highway, or even space. Red Hat collaborated with IBM to bring edge computing to the International Space Station. Edge computing can transform the way we live – and we’re doing it now.

Why collaboration is critical

Edge technologies are blending the digital and physical worlds in a new way that resonates at a human level. A great example is when we use AR/VR to improve safety on the factory floor. Continued collaboration will keep enabling breakthrough successes. Across industries and organizations, we are highly dependent on one another. There is a mutually supportive, symbiotic relationship between telecommunications and industrial sectors, in particular: 5G development cannot succeed without industrial use cases which are based on telco technologies. Numerous challenges remain: Reducing network complexity, maintaining security, improving agility, and ensuring a vibrant ecosystem. The only way to address them is through the collective wisdom of community. Red Hat uses open source to unify and empower communities on a broad scale. The open source ecosystem brings people together to focus on a common problem to solve with software. That shared purpose turns isolated efforts into collective ones so that changes are industry-wide, reflecting a range of needs and values. I’ve lived and breathed open source communities for most of my professional life, and their collaboration makes possible tremendous change to alter our future in many ways. For me, open source is the innovation engine for industry. If we collaborate on 5G and edge this way, nascent technologies could become exciting common foundations in the same way that Linux and Kubernetes have. When we work together, we are only limited by imagination,

From maps to apps and much more

I miss charting our routes via paper maps during my family’s summer vacations. Flash forward to today: Apps we take for granted on our phones or in our homes allow us to change our driving route in real time to avoid traffic, or to monitor and grant access to our front doors remotely. They shape how we interact with our environments and each other. Yet not so long ago, we barely had cloud technology, were in transition from 3G to 4G, and smartphones were new. A lot of people did important work to improve these core technologies and their convergence trends unlocked a hugely disruptive opportunity: A cloud-native, transportation service, enabled by your mobile phone, that picked you up wherever you were, and took you wherever you wanted to go. This was only possible because each trend built on the others. Imagine scrambling to find a Wi-Fi hotspot on the street corner, or whipping out your laptop outside a restaurant in the rain, or starting your business by constructing a massive data center. The convergence of smartphones, 4G networks, and cloud computing enabled a new world. Today we are creating the next set of technologies that will become so embedded in our lives and indispensable to our daily habits that we will wonder how we ever got by without them. Are you ready to wear clothes whose sensors tell you how healthy you are? The possibilities with edge technologies begins with the marriage of the digital and physical worlds. Adding in pervasive connectivity – leveraging a common 5G and edge platform – we can transform how operational technologies interact with the physical world that changes everything.

The future is now

We are creating a new world that’s hard to imagine, yet not so foreign because we’ve seen this story play out before. Expect new technologies to have profound implications for our daily lives, on how we interact with one another, and the social fabric of our world. But it can’t happen without collaboration. Look at how open source has empowered collaboration and how working together has helped people across organizations and industries build more robust, shared platforms more quickly. Then they differentiate on top of them, with apps and capabilities built on Kubernetes and Linux, for example. Lots of us are building that future right now. I’m very happy about that, especially as I’m still getting to know the ledges and edges of the White Mountains, while loving the digital connectivity and directions streaming through my phone. If you’re interested in more of these conversations, check out our related, on-demand content from the Red Hat 451 Edge Event in May.

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