Over The Edge

Today’s episode features an interview between Matt Trifiro and Stacey Higginbotham, Founder and Editor of Stacey on IoT.

Stacey has been covering technology for major publications for almost two decades and now produces a weekly podcast, newsletter, and daily articles covering all aspects of the internet of things under the Stacey on IoT brand. 

In this interview, Stacey explains the intersection between IoT and edge, how to think about IoT from the bottom-up perspective of the devices and manufacturers, and shares some interesting use cases and innovative companies tackling the most challenging problems in the space.

Key Quotes

• “The idea [of IoT] is that we now have cheap computing, we have cheap sensors, and we can start pulling all this information and synthesizing it in a very cost effective and efficient way. And we can know–not quite everything–but a lot about everything. And it's beautiful.”
• “IoT makes the invisible, visible. So you can see things that you haven't seen before.”
• “Think of IoT as the physical infrastructure that ties the internet, combined with the physical infrastructure needed on the things themselves. And then you add AI to it, which is the analysis and the synthesis of the data that's going to be coming in. That's the soul. AI is the soul, IoT is the body, and then you have this wonderful cloud of information that is so transformative.”
• “I want to make it easy for people to get excited about IoT, because this is really a big deal. It's as big as the invention of broadband or bringing mobile connectivity to everybody. You get all these new applications and we're just scratching the surface, and it's going to be awesome. Unless we utterly screw it up, which we totally are.”
• “I don't know if we're ever going to get to the ‘cloud version’ of the edge. When you're thinking about computing at the edge, you can't expect the wolves to all behave gracefully. So we have to build more safeguards in, which is going to be less efficient, which the cloud people hate. And the people talking to the cloud people are like, ‘it's really important.’ There's a dichotomy there that I think is under appreciated.”
• “The cloud thinking is ‘how can we form a monolith, how can we build an application that can run across a bunch of these servers?’ In IoT, I think we're going to come into this realization that what we really need are a bunch of individualized, highly personalized, customized applications. So the opposite of a monolith.”
• “Right now, especially when we talk about privacy and security, we're having this debate over convenience versus our potential loss of our individual liberties. I don't think many people are thinking of it that way, but they probably should be.”

Sponsors

Over the Edge is brought to you by the generous sponsorship of Catchpoint, NetFoundry, Ori Industries, Packet, Seagate, Vapor IO, and Zenlayer.

The featured sponsor of this episode of Over the Edge is Vapor IO, the leader in edge computing. We want to be your solution partner for the New Internet. Learn more at Vapor.io

Links

Connect with Matt on LinkedIn

Follow Stacey on  Twitter

staceyoniot.com

The IoT Podcast

Today’s episode features an interview between Matt Trifiro and Mahadev Satyanarayanan, also known as Satya. Satya is the Carnegie Group Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, and one of the true Godfathers of Edge Computing. 

Over the course of his multi-decade research career, Satya has pioneered many advances in distributed systems, mobile computing, and IoT, and in 2009 he co-authored “The Case for VM-based Cloudlets in Mobile Computing,” the groundbreaking research paper that led to the emergence of Edge.

In this interview, Satya shares how he started thinking about distributed computing infrastructure for mobile devices back in 1993, how much of his vision has come true in the decades since, and his views on the future of cloud, edge, IoT, and much more.

Key Quotes

“In 1997 we said, given that [the compute capability of] mobile devices is always going to be a challenge, how do we get substantial applications that require compute-intensive processing to run on a mobile device? The answer is to offload computation to the infrastructure. We were the first to demonstrate that capability in a published paper."

“When it comes to user experience, people have learned that it's not the mean that matters, it is the tail. Human user experience is greatly overweighted by a few negative experiences. You may have one hour on a zoom call, and 58 minutes of it may be excellent, but you will remember the two minutes that were miserable. This is generally true for augmented reality, and for all of these other [latency-sensitive] use cases.”

“It's useless to deploy 5G without edge computing. The truth is 5G is only going to improve your last mile quality. That's it.”

“How much end-to-end latency is acceptable is very much a function of the application. But it's a two-way street. The applications that get written depend on what today's technology can offer…If the application's demand gets too far ahead of what the technology can offer, then the application will die because it's not viable.”

“The ultimate beneficiaries of edge computing should make strategic investments that incentivize the creation of edge-native applications, and apply a different success criteria from what is traditionally applied by venture capitalists...That investment is valuable even without a hockey stick growth curve, because you are creating long term demand for the core product that you're creating, which is edge computing itself.”

Sponsors

Over the Edge is brought to you by the generous sponsorship of Catchpoint, NetFoundry, Ori Industries, Packet, Seagate, Vapor IO, and Zenlayer.

The featured sponsor of this episode of Over the Edge is Catchpoint. Catchpoint gives critical knowledge to help optimize the digital experience of your customers and employees. Learn more at catchpoint.com and sign up for a free trial.

Links

Open Edge Computing Initiative

Connect with Matt on LinkedIn

Satya's Home Page

Today’s episode features an interview between Matt Trifiro and Simon Crosby, CTO of SWIM.AI.

Simon’s impressive resume spans two decades in technology and includes highlights such as co-founder and CTO at XenSource, co-founder and CTO at Bromium, and CTO of Data Center and Cloud at Citrix. 

In this interview, Simon discusses how SWIM is solving the problem of stateless computing with its edge intelligence software that focuses on edge-based learning for fast-data and continuous intelligence. 

Key Quotes

“We’re moving from a world of big data, where you could reasonably store it all and then think about later, to one where data flows are boundless and you need to process it on the fly. You need to continuously process and analyze streaming data to get continuous intelligence to make your organization more responsible. But the big change is that, whereas before you could reasonably think about big data as a way to store stuff and then analyze it, now you can't.”

“The cloud has been tremendously successful really because of two big things. One is rest, which is stateless computing, and the other one is databases…But the problem with that is that stateless computing is a million times slower than the CPU. A million times slower. That means the difference between hours versus milliseconds in terms of getting results."

“In this era, we have data flows which are boundless. They never stop. And the data within them is of ephemeral value. So you can't store it and get to it later because later it’s useless. What you care about is that some representation can predict what's going to happen next, but you don't care about the past. So we have ephemeral data value and infinite data, and you need to compute on it continuously…and that's a whole new approach, algorithmically and mathematically.”

“We shouldn't apply AI to situations where the marginal cost of being wrong is high…if the cost of being wrong is very high, like somebody dies, just don't do it. But if the cost of being wrong is marginal who cares? Like my Uber may stop at a red light, who cares? Right? We're still better off…There are tons of opportunities for making the world better, where if you're wrong, you don't make it worse.”

Sponsors

Over the Edge is brought to you by the generous sponsorship of Catchpoint, NetFoundry, Ori Industries, Packet, Seagate, Vapor IO, and Zenlayer.

The featured sponsor of this episode of Over the Edge is Ori Industries. Ori Industries is building the world’s largest edge cloud. Their products power the next generation of intelligent applications through unparalleled access to major communication networks worldwide. Ori is laying the foundations for application developers to seamlessly deploy to uncharted edge computing infrastructure across the globe. Learn more at ori.co

Links

www.swimos.org

Connect with Matt on LinkedIn

Follow Simon on Twitter

Today’s episode features an interview between Matt Trifiro and Mahdi Yahya, CEO & Founder of Ori Industries.

Mahdi is an entrepreneur, investor, and former telecommunications executive who spent over 10 years building networks in data centers across the globe. 

In this interview, Mahdi articulates his ambitious vision for bringing cloud-native technology to the edge and building a new kind of cloud with the ability to power and scale the new internet.

Key Quotes

• We're on the eve of a new internet… A smart internet that will power hospitals, cities, factories that are becoming increasingly intelligent and autonomous even today. And this internet requires a new cloud to power it, one that will be able to deliver it at scale. At Ori, we are building the new cloud that will allow us to power and scale this new internet.”
• “If you are familiar with the telecom world, you know that there is a very real opportunity right now, and my focus is to seize that opportunity. We are working with the telecoms industry because we know it, I've worked with them for a very long time. I've worked with them from the outside in wholesale, and now in federation, and all these things that we can apply to edge computing. I'm applying my previous knowledge of that space and it's working, we're gaining a lot of traction.”
• “I think the value today is securing the developers because building an edge native developer community is a big thing. We're all working towards that in the end, because that's how we secure the demand for the market, and the moment we capitalize on that demand, then we can scale the market.”
• “For edge to work well, especially in the telecom space, you need a lot of infrastructure changes in place, and 5G is driving those changes. This is where I see the value of 5G for edge: it accelerated a lot of these changes on the legacy networks, and allows us to start running workloads exactly where we need them to run on the network in an efficient, distributed, and clever way.”
• “I think soon the biggest trend in edge is going to be intelligence. How do you make these platforms more intelligent? Because in public clouds today, yes they are building a lot of products that are increasingly distributed, but when you look at this distributed infrastructure over a vast geography, the game is different.”

Sponsors

Over the Edge is brought to you by the generous sponsorship of Catchpoint, NetFoundry, Ori Industries, Packet, Seagate, Vapor IO, and Zenlayer.

The featured sponsor of this episode of Over the Edge is Zenlayer. Improving user experience doesn't have to be complicated or expensive. Zenlayer helps you lower latency with on-demand edge services in over 150 PoPs around the world. Find out how you can improve your users' experience today at zenlayer.com/edge

Links

Connect with Matt on LinkedIn

Follow Mahdi on Twitter

Today’s episode features an interview between Matt Trifiro and Sarah Beaudoin, Head of Customer Advocacy and Early Stage Marketing at ZEDEDA. 

As an early-stage marketer at ZEDEDA, Sarah is tackling the problems of creating awareness and adoption in a burgeoning industry.

In this interview, Sarah discusses her approach to solving those problems, as well as the present and future use cases and challenges of IoT deployment at the edge.

Key Quotes

• “In terms of edge and where we are today, there are a lot of unknowns. There's no prescription for ‘here's how you need to be successful at the edge’…But what we do know is that there are certain principles, like building it on an open architecture so you've got the flexibility to be able to work with whatever hardware and applications and cloud you need to work with.”
• “When it comes to early-stage marketing, what we're doing is a lot of education across the board in terms of what is possible. It's about sharing examples of what customers are doing successfully, and sharing what people are trying to do– being a conduit so people can understand what else is out there.”
• “From an early stage marketing perspective, it's very much about helping you understand what's possible. Here are the things you need to think about that are going to help you, not just today, but that can help you make sure that whatever you're putting in place today is going to expand to what you needed two years.”
• “One thing that we're seeing across the board at the edge is that no single company is going to just own this space. This is an ecosystem of players that are going to work together to build solutions.”
• “Latency always comes up as the number one reason why people think we need edge computing…But latency is not the number one issue for any of our customers. They're doing it because of bandwidth. They're doing it because they have too much data to send all of it to the cloud. It's too expensive. It takes too long. They need to deal with that data at the edge.”
• “The edge has to be open…we believe very strongly in the power of open source and the fact that the edge–because it is so diverse in use cases and applications and hardware–it has to have an open foundation.”

Sponsors

Over the Edge is brought to you by the generous sponsorship of Catchpoint, NetFoundry, Ori Industries, Packet, Seagate, Vapor IO, and Zenlayer.

The featured sponsor of this episode of Over the Edge is Packet, an Equinix company. Packet is the leader in bare metal automation. They are on a mission to protect, connect, and power the digital world with developer-friendly physical infrastructure and a neutral, interconnected ecosystem that spans over 55 global markets.  Learn more at packet.com.

Links

Connect with Matt on LinkedIn

Follow Sarah on Twitter

Today’s episode features an interview between guest host Jacob Smith, VP of Bare Metal Strategy and Marketing at Equinix, and Cole Crawford, CEO and Founder of Vapor IO.

Cole is also the co-founder of the Open 19 Foundation, founding Executive Director of the Open Compute Project, former Chairman of the Open Data Center Alliance, and co-founder of OpenStack.

In this interview, Cole lays out his vision for creating the world’s first intelligent, hyper-modular data center solution, and how Vapor is fixing the fundamental architectural problems of the internet.

Key Quotes

“The internet is still fundamentally broken today if you want to solve for autonomous robotics or autonomous driving or the future state of remote surgery…I think there are ways in which we can enhance the internet that we've built and make it better.”

“If you look back through every successful company, every big dot com, every big Silicon Valley startup, one of the things that they did really well—what ends up being the killer app for everything is economics and the easy button. If you can make it faster, better, cheaper, and you make it easy to consume, you're going to do well. That’s the mission that Vapor is on– to fix the architectural issues with the guts of the internet.”

“I think there are three things [that open hardware does]: lower the technical barrier of entry on the technical front, you increase the pace of innovation, and you democratize or commoditize those things that really have no value.”

Sponsors

Over the Edge is brought to you by the generous sponsorship of Catchpoint, NetFoundry, Ori Industries, Packet, Seagate, Vapor IO, and Zenlayer.

The featured sponsor of this episode of Over the Edge is Vapor IO, the leader in edge computing. We want to be your solution partner for the New Internet. Learn more at Vapor.io

Links

Connect with Matt on LinkedIn

Follow Cole on  Twitter

Today’s episode features an interview between Matt Trifiro and Alex Reznik, Distinguished Technologist at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Chair of ETSI’s MEC ISG.

Alex literally wrote the book on Multi-Access Edge Computing, and as Chair of ETSI MEC he is helping to pioneer the industry standards for enabling the Intelligent Edge.

In this interview, Alex explains the role of standards bodies like ETSI, how standards drive market adoption, and why they are important for the future of the edge intersection between telcos, cloud providers, and developers.

Key Quotes

“In the final state of this MEC public edge computing game, there [will be] a presence from most of the major cloud providers in most of the operator networks.”

“If telcos are going to succeed in capturing value, they will have standards in a space where ETSI MEC plays. It doesn't mean they have to adopt ETSI MEC standards, but they will have to agree on a set of standards in that space. Our value is, we're the only standard right now that plays in that space. So you can either go and form a new group and start from scratch, or you can go with ETSI MEC.”

“With 5G, specifically because so many of the 5G applications need the edge, and edge means location, [the telcos] have leverage. Amazon and Microsoft and lots of other people have to talk directly to the telcos. That's real leverage. Now what are they going to do with it?”

“Show the operators the money. They want to see the money. They don't want to see a strategy talk about how much money the hyperscalers are making on the cloud and what portion of that market they can address and what the TAM for edge computing is...they want to see the money in six months.”

Sponsors

Over the Edge is brought to you by the generous sponsorship of Catchpoint, NetFoundry, Ori Industries, Packet, Seagate, Vapor IO, and Zenlayer.

The featured sponsor of this episode of Over the Edge is Seagate Technology. Seagate’s new CORTX Intelligent Object Storage Software is 100% open source. It enables efficient capture and consolidation of massive, unstructured data sets for the lowest cost per petabyte. Learn more and join the community at seagate.com

Links

Alex's book, "Multi-Access Edge Computing In Action"

ETSI MEC ISG

CLICK HERE to Register for the Edge Computing World Conference, October 12-15th, 2020. Fully virtual. Use the promo code OVERTHEEDGE for 30% off the Edge Executive Conference

Connect with Matt on LinkedIn

Today’s episode features an interview between Matt Trifiro and Colby Synesael, Senior Equity Research Analyst at Cowen and Company

Colby has been covering the communications infrastructure and telecom services industries as a senior research analyst since 2006, and recently co-authored Cowen’s extensive Ahead of the Curve report on edge computing and the future of the internet. 

In this interview, Colby offers his unique perspective on the investment decisions that are powering the growth of edge infrastructure, the elements that will enable True 5G, and how the pieces work together to usher in the fourth industrial revolution.

Key Quotes

“While edge computing is not dependent on 5G, 5G is dependent on edge computing…The edge infrastructure that is obviously tied to edge computing is going to be required to enable what we refer to as ‘True 5G.’”

 “When you take all three of those aspects--the bandwidth speed that’s north of a hundred megabits, the latency that’s sub-10 milliseconds, and the massive machine connectivity or IOT—that, combined, is the recipe to enable True 5G.”

“The beauty of True 5G is it's going to enable a lot of new businesses to leverage a wireless network beyond the phone that's never really happened before…And when we talk about True 5G, that's really what we're referring to, and to make that happen, absolutely a physical edge infrastructure is going to have to be out there.”

“With these three key attributes–the speed, the latency, and that massive connectivity–ultimately it enables what many people refer to as the fourth industrial revolution. And that's going to create a whole new set of market opportunities that are going to happen across just about every industry.”

“When you think about the internet in its current iteration, it's really been built for humans…This next iteration of the internet–which very much is tied to edge computing and 5G– is actually going to be built more for machines…It’s going to unleash this huge opportunity, and that altogether is what we refer to as the fourth industrial revolution.”

“The way I think about it [edge] is that it's not an explicit definition. It's not black and white. It's an evolution. It's a concept. And we're already starting to see that happening today. And at some point…we're going to see an inflection point where there finally is enough infrastructure that you start to see some of these newer use cases start to come to market.”  

“I don't think of the edge as cannibalizing the cloud. I think of the edge as expanding the TAM–the total addressable market–for the cloud...You're not cannibalizing the demand, you're augmenting it.”

Sponsors

Over the Edge is brought to you by the generous sponsorship of Catchpoint, NetFoundry, Ori Industries, Packet, Seagate, Vapor IO, and Zenlayer.

The featured sponsor of this episode of Over the Edge is Ori Industries. Ori Industries is building the world’s largest edge cloud. Their products power the next generation of intelligent applications through unparalleled access to major communication networks worldwide. Ori is laying the foundations for application developers to seamlessly deploy to uncharted edge computing infrastructure across the globe. Learn more at ori.co

Links

CLICK HERE to Register for the Edge Computing World Conference, October 12-15th, 2020. Fully virtual. Use the promo code OVERTHEEDGE for 30% off the Edge Executive Conference

Connect with Matt on LinkedIn

Today’s episode features an interview between Matt Trifiro and Victor Bahl, Technical Fellow and Director of Mobility & Networking at Microsoft Research, and one of the fathers of Edge Computing. 

Across a 23-year career at Microsoft Research, Victor has helped shape Microsoft’s long-term strategy through research, industry partnerships, and associated policy engagement with governments and research institutions around the world. His seminal 2009 paper titled “The Case for VM-based Cloudlets in Mobile Computing” spawned the vision for what we now call Edge. 

In this interview, Victor shares the story behind the genesis of that paper, and his experience of the evolution of edge in the years since.

Key Quotes

“You can start to see a convergence of sorts between the communication and computing industry, and edge is the catalyst for that…Some sort of convergence is going to happen and it's going to be good because we are using each other's strengths and building on top of it rather than spending time doing the same thing.”

"The question for me as a researcher and a person who tries to think many years ahead was “what happens after cloud?”

“If you think about what the cloud is, the cloud effectively sells you compute and storage…and [we thought] wouldn't it be cool if the cloud not only sold storage, it not only sold compute, but it also sold latency...wouldn't it be cool to have an edge where the latency was small.”

“The internet works on a protocol called BGP,  and that protocol has not been optimized for latency sensitivity. It has been optimized for cost sensitivity. So as the packets are routed, they are not routed with latency in mind. That’s why you end up seeing all these problems and jitter, which is a killer for many things.”

“If you actually create software, you can think of a network operating system. And then you can think of an API that you put on top of that. And then on top of that, you've got all these applications and then developers can party. So you're looking at a brand new ecosystem that is now seeded because of edge computing.”

“The way I like to think about it is “Wow, We're getting there! We've gotten there!” Because now when I talk to people, it’s no longer about trying to convince anybody of the need for edge. It seems like people get it…I no longer have to make the case for it. The thing that most people are looking at now is how to monetize the edge–how to actually light these things up.”

“I think that you can start thinking about edge as part of cloud even now. Because Microsoft is invested, we are building it out. We are building out the infrastructure. We are going to make it available. It's going to be there.”

Sponsors

Over the Edge is brought to you by the generous sponsorship of Catchpoint, NetFoundry, Ori Industries, Packet, Seagate, Vapor IO, and Zenlayer.

The featured sponsor of this episode of Over the Edge is Seagate Technology. Seagate’s new CORTX Intelligent Object Storage Software is 100% open source. It enables efficient capture and consolidation of massive, unstructured data sets for the lowest cost per petabyte. Learn more and join the community at seagate.com

Links

CLICK HERE to Register for the Edge Computing World Conference, October 12-15th, 2020. Fully virtual. Use the promo code OVERTHEEDGE for 30% off the Edge Executive Conference

Connect with Matt on LinkedIn

Follow Victor on Twitter

Today’s episode features an interview between Matt Trifiro and Gavin Whitechurch, Co-Founder of Edge Computing World and COO & Co-Founder of Topio Networks

Gavin is a technology analyst, media executive & entrepreneur who started Topio Networks and the Edge Computing World Conference to serve as industry catalysts, helping to nurture the industry and accelerate the markets for Edge Computing, IoT, mobility, and more

In this interview, Gavin uses his overarching perspective on the Edge landscape to give insights about where the industry is headed and how the market for Edge solutions is evolving.

Key Quotes

"I see this increasing maturity in the market and increasing understanding of what edge computing offers. Particularly in the last year, there's much greater awareness in the technology market of why edge computing is important and what uniquely it offers to developers and to technology companies." -Gavin

"I think we’re going to see much more of a distributed compute model–the market will move to a more distributed compute architecture, and it'll get more and more distributed over the next two decades. I would say it's probably actually going to take two decades for that whole thing to play out. I think where we are now is like the early stages of mobile." -Gavin

"IoT is much further up its maturity curve. It was one of those things that perhaps suffered from its own hype…but we're now getting to the large-scale deployments. We've run surveys that show that 2021 will probably be a massive year of adoption for widespread IoT." -Gavin

"I think there is a huge appetite for what edge computing can do…I think we have a more realistic view of things as a technology industry now, and I think that some of the things that are happening around us are actually going to ensure that there is an earlier deployment of those systems." -Gavin

"We’ve spoken to a lot of companies that have said that automation is being accelerated. There's a reprioritization in boardrooms and a realization that…Covid is in many ways accelerating digital transformation and automation." -Gavin

"I think this pandemic may significantly accelerate the deployment of edge computing because of that shift in capital expense, spending by the companies who will benefit from that automation" -Matt 

"I can't think of an industry that's this big that has had so much cohesion and acceleration around open source code. There’s this collective mechanism that didn't exist when the cloud was first being formed. There has been so much clear agreement and cohesion on the core supporting technologies that need to be developed and adopted in order for us all to have a platform." -Matt

Sponsors

Over the Edge is brought to you by the generous sponsorship of Catchpoint, NetFoundry, Ori Industries, Packet, Seagate, Vapor IO, and Zenlayer.

The featured sponsor of this episode of Over the Edge is Catchpoint. Catchpoint gives critical knowledge to help optimize the digital experience of your customers and employees. Learn more at catchpoint.com and sign up for a free trial.

Links

CLICK HERE to Register for the Edge Computing World Conference, October 12-15th, 2020. Fully virtual. Use the promo code OVERTHEEDGE for 30% off the Edge Executive Conference

Connect with Matt on LinkedIn

Follow Gavin on Twitter