Firms Chase New Edge Computing Roles and Revenues

Many possible roles and business models exist for edge computing: on the device, on the enterprise premises or at some other location in a metro area, supplied by a hyperscale computing as a service supplier, a connectivity provider, directly by enterprises as a private network or by other third parties providing neutral host computing. 

To the extent that content delivery networks were an early form of edge computing, Akamai can claim it has the largest edge computing business, at the moment. “The Akamai Intelligent Edge

Platform has grown to include over 300,000 servers in over 4,000 locations and nearly 1,500 network partners,” the company says. 

“We’re the largest provider of edge computing services by far,” says Tom Leighton, company CEO. 

Separately, Cloudflare, which initially provided content delivery network services, now is branching out into edge computing services, working with Vapor IO and EdgeMicro for the local data center real estate. 

Also, Vodafone Business is building a private private 5G network for Centrica Storage. That is not, strictly speaking,  an “edge computing” deployment, but supports Cenrica’s own enterprise edge computing capabilities. 

The three developments illustrate the different potential business models for edge computing (content delivery) and infrastructure edge computing, or multi-access edge computing services offered by connectivity providers. Akamai’s CDN services are a form of edge computing. 

Cloudflare is branching out from CDN services to cloud computing as a service. Vodafone likely is acting as a system integrator. 

Then there is Amazon Web Services Outposts, a fully managed service that extends AWS infrastructure, AWS services, application programmer interfaces (APIs), and tools to virtually any data center, colocation space, or on-premises facility.

Outposts is one example of how some parts of the edge computing business might not require use of edge computing facilities owned or managed by telcos or other edge computing providers offering neutral host computing and storage.

source: Rackspace

Instead, AWS Outposts essentially is one way to support hybrid computing, with AWS edge computing inside enterprise data centers. AWS also will support other forms of edge computing that put the actual servers at some location outside the enterprise but possibly within a metro area, in partnership with some telcos, for example. 

In those cases the computing or storage as a service is supplied by AWS, the colocation facilities by a connectivity service provider. Outposts is not designed for small retail customers but for enterprise data centers, as is clear from the data center requirements. 

In other cases, new entities creating edge computing facilities within a single metro area to support their own operations might--as AWS has done--also allow third party use of services at those facilities. Retailer Walmart provides an example.