MobiledgeX has launched a new, interactive tool designed to foster industry-wide collaboration on near-term edge computing use cases.
The Edge Navigator tool is based on three years of proprietary edge market research conducted by Deutsche Telekom (DT) and MobiledgeX. DT founded MobiledgeX in 2017 as an independent company to focus on building out use cases for edge computing.
At the time, industry experts were beginning to explore how edge computing could make computing and storage resources available to developers to create new consumer and enterprise experiences and to connect new emerging devices, said Eric Braun, chief commercial officer for MobiledgeX. After three years of research, which involved hundreds of interviews across 200 different businesses, MobiledgeX’s new tool is being released to the public.
“We’re addressing what we think of as a new value chain, and we’re providing the missing piece to enabling that new value chain, which is providing a solution that can work with and provide new opportunities to operators themselves as the supplier of infrastructure,” Braun told FierceWirelessTech. “We’re aggregating all that infrastructure and aggregating a commercial and operational model for it.”
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The tool acts as a living edge market model designed to help developers pin down the top near-term use cases for edge computing, based on perceptions and market factors within the industry. The top 15 use cases, determined by MobiledgeX’s data, include things like V2X communications, multiplayer gaming, analytics and management in manufacturing and factories, location information using GIS precision positioning path planning, as well as augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) hardware support. In all, the company has identified 48 use cases across domains such as healthcare, drones, cars, AR/VR and smart cities.
But MobiledgeX is hoping users will contribute their own predictions to the dataset. The tool enables users to adjust the weight of edge factors such as latency, geo-spatial knowledge and data residency and customize assumptions about market factors such as potential size of the market, venture capitalist activity, and coverage needed, to rank and score the potential use cases for near-term viability. Users can create their own scoring, using their own expertise to make predictions, and add their predictions to the larger dataset.
“This is the beginning of a conversation for the industry,” Braun said. “We look at it as a tool for people to explore. We’re looking for value to be added and answers to be derived as contributions are made to this resource for the whole industry to benefit from.”
The goal is to give industry participants “a map to figure out where to invest and where the demand side is,” Braun said.
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In conjunction with the release of the tool, industry analyst Chetan Sharma has published a report on insights gleaned from the tool.
“We don’t entirely know which horizontal and vertical segments will be the biggest winners or which specific feature set will be most used by the developers or how fast they will scale,” Sharma said in his report. “Each entity will look at the edge computing opportunity from their own lens be it their vertical industry or a tool that serves the ecosystem.”
“We think the opportunity is best understood with the help of the developer community and the ecosystem,” he added. “By refining it over time as more insights and data become available, we will be able to understand the long-lasting impact of edge computing and shape the opportunities to come.”