Innovating on the Edge

FountainBlue’s March 18 VIP Roundtable was on the topic of ‘Innovating on the Edge’, with opening remarks by Micron. Our executives in attendance had a wide range of experience and perspectives on the challenges and opportunities around innovating on the edge. Below is a compilation of their advice.

About Edge Computing

With the continued evolution of technology, there will be continued consolidations, aggregations, innovations, etc., but edge computing will be a foundational piece of current and future technology trends.
Advice for Managing Innovations on the Edge

• Strategize and manage to ensure optimization and continuous improvement, even when we can’t predict our future.
• Take an end-to-end management perspective to oversee all the moving parts which could positively or negatively impact your ability to deliver customized solutions on the edge.
• Design hyper automation (extreme automation) algorithms based on data delivered from the edge.
• Look for areas where technology innovation on the edge could greatly improve a process, and more efficiently deliver an accurate result.

Thoughts on Challenges 

As we continue to develop more devices/sensors/phones etc on to the edge, there will be amplified needs to:

• ensure the privacy, security and access for individual users while aggregating the most relevant content for immediate and future use
• minimize latency times so that automated actions can take place – lives are at times at stake!
• securely and efficiently manage the huge volumes of data for immediate, short term, and long term usage
• manage multiple operating systems and applications on individual computers to ensure efficiency, productivity and security
• integrate legacy and bleeding edge solutions into applications which serve current need
• consider supply chain issues which would impact the hardware we design, manufacture and distribute to be placed on the edge

Opportunities for growth, including:

• designing sensors which capture temperature, vibration, sound, photo and audio input
• producing devices on the edge which can check their own status and even automate processes based on these checks
• creating always-on sensors which use little power and only act when triggering events occur
• offering predictive analytics based on volumes of data collected
• managing collected data to ensure privacy and security while gathering relevant aggregated data  
• focusing on specificities around locations which may help multiple entities manage solutions in specific areas

In the end, as we look at innovating on the edge, we must look at the journey of the data (as it touches the software, hardware, apps), the needs of the customers (for privacy, security and access), the infrastructure and requirements (policy, broadband), and need to manage the old and the new (tools, technologies and people). Now that’s a TALL order. The innovators and collaborators will have an ‘edge’ in this market.  

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