Boosted by the acceleration of complex IoT solutions deployments, both for professional (e.g. connected factories), public (e.g. Smart Cities) and private (e.g. autonomous vehicles) environments, Edge Computing is becoming unavoidable.
Edge Computing can be defined as a decentralized cloud architecture. It allows to move computing, storage and network resources closer to the consumer. As a result, Edge Computing has three advantages over traditional cloud computing:
- Lower latency;
- Network saturation is reduced because only essential data is sent to the network core;
- Data can be processed or stored more easily in a sovereign territory.
Originally, Edge Computing was conceived as a mobile architecture, called "MEC" for "Mobile Edge Computing". One of its goals was to address the latency requirements of 5G. Today, standardization bodies are still talking about "MEC" but to designate a fixed and mobile Edge Computing architecture.
Source Sofrecom: "Edge Computing: what opportunities for telecom operators?
As many countries deploy their 5G architecture, new use cases continue to emerge, and Edge Computing will support very large computing and data processing capacities, with near real-time capabilities.
As 5G service providers, operators are looking to innovate to deliver core infrastructure services and advanced cloud-based scheduling services.
It is in this context that our customer, a wholesale operator, called upon our experts to understand the business cases and economic interest of Edge Computing for both the telecom and more specifically the wholesale market.
Methodology
In order to provide concrete answers on the uses of Edge Computing, our strategy experts proceeded in several steps:
- Understanding the current market and its evolution,
- Focus on 5 use cases with the modeling of a market potential and the definition of a specific architecture,
- Business evaluation of impacts, with three possible positioning for our customer
- Setting up a collaborative workshop with internal experts around the different positioning,
- Internal and external interviews (start-up) to enrich the business analysis.
These different steps allowed us to highlight the economic interest induced by this market and the possibilities that Edge Computing would offer in 5 years.
Results
The study allowed the customer to establish its convictions about Edge computing by providing a better understanding of the business and technological challenges, particularly through the interviews conducted.
Three value pockets were identified for our customer with a 5-year vision.
The project was presented to our customer’s management committee and Edge Computing was integrated into its 5-year strategic plan.
