Edge Computing World 2019 – A Review

Last week, EDJX was the Gold Sponsor of the inaugural Edge Computing World, held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. CA – minutes from Google’s HQ. Our team was thrilled at the quality of execution and look forward to attending again at future events. The event attendees and speakers consisted of over 500 hand-selected attendees from across the Edge Computing technology stack and over 80 speakers, including our own James Thomason and Brad Kirby from EDJX. Executive speakers from all the big players – including Google, Facebook, AWS, Microsoft Azure, Intel, SAP, VMWare, Cisco, HPE, Dell, etc. – were in attendance. Telco representation included Verizon, AT&T, Orange, Dish Network and Bell Canada. Emerging companies like Horizon, Hatch and Vapor IO were also well-represented. From hardware, software, and networking, to AI, DLT, and industry consortiums, an extraordinary amount of effort was focused on curating a credible cast of attendees.

1) Software is the key to integration of hardware for IoT, and IoT will rely on edge computing.

And that doesn’t mean Kubernetes and container orchestration. We think while that might solve some problems for traditional cloud apps, IoT app development poses new challenges that often impede development, resulting in more than 75% of projects failing. We see the need to make IOT development seamless and simple for developers The constraints and challenges of IoT devices utilizing edge computing lead us – along with many others – to conclude that serverless is not an optional feature; it will be a requirement. “Kludgernetes” is a band-aid solution that will soon be replaced.

2) Enterprise use cases are front and center.

Several impressive presentations clearly demonstrated the potential of edge computing. Chetan Sharma explained the $4.1 Trillion edge economy; HTC Vive highlighted opportunity to utilize VR, AR & “XR” in predictive maintenance; Uber discussed autonomous vehicle requirements; and Proctor & Gamble helped clarify their edge opportunities.

A panel of edge computing investors included Michael Dolbec (GE Ventures), Maryanna Saenko (Future Ventures),, Andile Ngcaba (Convergence Partners), Todd H Poole (HPE Pathfinder) and Nina Hughes (axiomada). They agreed that there is substantial interest and capital to invest in edge computing companies today, with GE Ventures citing a dozen investments to date. Overall, the consensus across the industry was that edge computing is about to move into the real world.

3) Edge computing is moving rapidly into the real world.

Many companies claim to have working products but the reality is that most are not live. From the number of demos we viewed over 4 days, it is clear the market is still very early from a product perspective. The race for the market is wide open and the innovative companies that can stitch together key key elements like killer user experience, real security, an ability to scale and new economic models stand to win big.

Concluding Remarks

The founding team at Topio Networks did an incredible executing this event, but after attending IoT Tech Expo in November, we were not surprised. EDJX left the conference feeling the edge computing ecosystem is vibrant and growing. We look forward to playing a role in the next generation of edge computing technology!
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