Edge Strategies in Industry: Overview and Challenges

This paper discusses some details from the 2020 NetSoft conference DEP panel. This panel consisted of industry experts, and as such the perspective presented here is biased with an industry view of Edge Computing. In sharing this discussion and further expanding on the discussion in this paper the hope is to provide the research community with guidance on opportunities to advance and possibly accelerate the rate of Edge adoption (Tiwari et al., 2021). There is no avoiding the Edge discussion; today in industry Communication Service Providers see this is an avenue to monetize their 5G investment, the cloud providers, also known as the `hyperscalers', see this as providing an ingress point into new markets, and finally enterprises themselves see this as an opportunity to modernize and gain business advantages through insights and better process management. Two U.S. based mobile network operators have edge portfolios (AT&T Edge Solutions, 2021 and Verizon, 2021). Many examples exist around the globe with other network service providers, an exhaustive list would consume this paper. In addition, 2020 saw Microsoft acquire two Independent Software Vendors (ISV's), Metaswitch and Affirmed. This clearly is intended to bring edge capability into their Azure product line.