Edge Revenues Too Small to Enumerate, Right Now

Edge computing "as a service" is among the big carrot for internet service providers intrigued by multi-access edge computing. To be sure, incremental 5G connection revenues will matter, as will some incremental real estate revenue (providing the edge computing racks, air conditioning, power, secured locations).

But most of the new revenue will come from the actual computing services, provided privately, as infrastructure (enterprises deploying owned infrastructure) or publicly, in the form of X as a service.

The issue is how much revenue upside exists for most connectivity providers. Today it is almost meaningless to break out "edge" computing as a category. That will change over time.

Worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services is forecast to grow 23.1 percent in 2021 to total $332.3 billion, up from $270 billion in 2020, according to Gartner. Key trends include containerization, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, internet of things and edge computing, as you would guess. 

Worldwide Public Cloud Services End-User Spending Forecast US$ Billions
	2020	2021	2022
Cloud Business Process Services (BPaaS)	46,131	50,165	53,121
Cloud Application Infrastructure Services (PaaS)	46,335	59,451	71,525
Cloud Application Services (SaaS)	102,798	122,633	145,377
Cloud Management and Security Services	14,323	16,029	18,006
Cloud System Infrastructure Services (IaaS)	59,225	82,023	106,800
Desktop as a Service (DaaS)	1,220	2,046	2,667
Total Market	270,033	332,349	397,496
BPaaS = business process as a service; IaaS = infrastructure as a service; PaaS = platform as a service; SaaS = software as a service

source: Gartner