MWC 2019: Industry rallies around the intelligent edge

Prepare for a 5G IoT explosion

According to analyst firm Strategic Analytics, companies introducing mobile IoT services are entering the market at an ideal time now that network roll-outs have reached critical mass and the ecosystem is more pragmatic.

In his keynote speech at MWC 2019, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, spoke about the merits of putting intelligence at the edge of an IoT network.

“Computing is no longer confined to a device or even a single datacentre,” he said. “Instead, it’s ubiquitous fabric, it’s distributed from the cloud to the edge, closer to where data is generated, and with the ability to adapt to the wide range of inputs, whether it’s touch, speech, vision or gestures.”

Intel hopes to expand its addressable market by shifting from a company known for its PC chips to one that provides technology to process data.

Last month, the company’s new CEO, Bob Swan, wrote a letter to customers and investors, stating: “We are evolving from a PC-centric to a data-centric company that builds the technology foundation powering the world’s innovations.

“Our ambitions have never been greater and we have a relatively small share of the largest addressable market in Intel’s history. We must remain focused on playing offence and innovating for an increasingly data-centric world. A world where all data needs to be processed, moved, stored and analysed.”

During MWC 2019, Intel unveiled the Open Network Edge Services Software (OpenNESS) toolkit, an open-source reference it hopes will encourage growth of an ecosystem to create and deploy new edge applications and services. Intel claimed OpenNESS helps simplify network complexity for developers and enables secure on-boarding of edge services.

Sandra Rivera, senior vice-president and general manager of Intel's network platforms group, said: “The network edge provides new opportunities closer to the point of data creation and consumption.”

She said data represented a $10tn 5G market opportunity by 2035, and that the vast volume of data generated and acted on every day would drive the transformation of communication networks. This would disrupt industries and inspire a global ecosystem of technology companies to seize a seemingly limitless market opportunity.

“OpenNESS will make it easier for cloud and internet of things developers to engage with a worldwide ecosystem of hardware, software and solutions integrators to develop new 5G and edge use cases and services,” said Rivera.

Moving IoT data around between different applications and services is behind new integrations between SAP Leonardo IoT and Azure IoT, which Microsoft and SAP claim would simplify the collection and ingestion of data and stream it into business applications, such as SAP S/4Hana.

“The SAP Leonardo IoT will leverage Azure IoT services, including Azure IoT Hub and Azure IoT Edge, to provide access to market leading secure connectivity, powerful Device Management functionality and a global scale data ingestion engine,” said Sam George director, Azure, internet of things, at Microsoft.

“This will enable customers to seamlessly extend their SAP enterprise business processes to the edge, reducing their dependency on latency, bandwidth or connectivity, while creating immersive business experiences that are highly responsive and contextually aware.”