Digital infrastructure does not just reside in central datacenters. It includes the assets in what is known as "edge" locations: network points of presence, buildings, campuses, and metro colocation facilities that deliver enhanced customer experiences, embed intelligence into business operations, and support ongoing industry innovations.
Investment in edge use cases and solutions that include emerging technology such as IoT, AI, and 5G networks is accelerating as hardware, software, services, and communications evolve and mature. As a result, edge computing has become a top priority for C-suite executives and is critical to the success of strategic business objectives. Demand for edge solutions has created a competitive market with growth opportunities for OEMs, ISVs, service providers, and other suppliers — many of which will need to form partnerships and alliances in order to satisfy all requirements.
IDC's EdgeView 2022: Premium is intended to aid technology organizations, hardware vendors, software developers, services suppliers, and investors in better understanding the buying intentions of their customers, helping devise strategies and solutions that address current and emerging use cases for technology and workloads at the edge. This includes outlining the primary motivations for deploying infrastructure and applications closer to where data is generated and consumed, exploring such aspects as latency, cost, resiliency, security, and compliance.
Edge Computing Platforms (Edge Platforms)
- Examines the use of platforms designed and built for deployment at edge locations, deployments, and/or use cases, including segmentation by physical size, compute (processing) capabilities, data persistence (storage), networking, and the ability to aggregate data from, and control actuation functions of, endpoints into "heavy" edge and "light" edge
Edge Software
- Covers systems infrastructure software solutions that provide the basic foundational layers of software for bare metal infrastructure hardware resources to host higher-level application software, including the virtualization, container, orchestration, and management software used to configure, control, automate, and share the use of those resources across heterogeneous applications and user groups
Edge-Provisioned Services
- Details the opportunity for public cloud, communications, content delivery networks (CDN), and colocation services provisioned by suppliers using edge platforms to deliver workloads at the edge
- Banner book of data crosstabs, including worldwide and regional-level granularity
- Survey findings, including worldwide and regional-level granularity
- Executive summary — overview of the survey results, including key edge strategies, best practices, and recommendations
In addition to the insight provided in this service, IDC may conduct research on specific topics or emerging market segments via research offerings that require additional IDC funding and client investment.
