Public edge cloud demand to reach $34B, wireless operators ready their platforms
Analysys Mason Ltd., a digital communications consulting and research firm, has released a sponsored market-sizing report stating that global spending on public edge cloud is expected to grow at least 62 percent from 2019 to 2025 and reach $34B. The forecast is noteworthy because it is one of the first to focus exclusively on services around edge cloud, and not things like 5G infrastructure and IoT hardware and software spend.
Analysys Mason’s research director, Caroline Chappell, said that for the report the company examined 250 enterprises in four developed markets around the globe. Researchers “were looking at the link between their digital-transformation plans and their desire to use cloud computing, including edge cloud computing,” said Chappell on a recent webinar.
Chappell said her team was “frankly surprised by the strength of market demand” for edge computing in general, and public edge in particular. Manufacturing, financial services, and health care will be the fastest-growing sectors, rising 10.5%, 5.3%, and 4.3%, respectively. That being said, the forecast was created prior to the dramatic global economic slowing caused by the coronavirus Covid-19.
The research indicates that even as flush with cash as aggressive technology startups can be, founders are not ready to spend lavishly on public edge systems. That leaves medium-sized to global companies as the principal consumers of public edge cloud, and chief executives there are very ready to buy, the report stated.
Why? The alternatives are not appealing. While CIOs and CDOs want to hold data close in the hope of keeping it safe, many new applications that are key to digital transformation efforts are highly sensitive to latency and jitter, according to the report. Executives are also not hungry to rebuild or add on to their in-house information technology departments – not even to lease systems that third-party vendors operate on the premises. Therefore, public edge cloud services will fill the gaps left when cloud services and new internal IT systems are ruled out.
The report defined public edge as including local data centers in public locations close to end-users, cell towers, central offices, and operator metropolitan data centers. Revenue from IaaS, PaaS, and underlying colocation services was included, along with business integration services. Swedish telecommunications and networking manufacturer Ericsson funded the market-sizing study through its edge computing unit, Edge Gravity.
Wireless alliance says it will spur edge spending
Telecommunications companies the world over are ready to become providers of efficient and dependable 5G services, according to a statement by an international association of mobile network vendors. They just need a nudge.
The Next Generation Mobile Networks Alliance, based in Frankfurt, Germany, has said its members will try to take some of the risks out of moving up the wireless services echelon, including the deployment of edge computing.
The alliance has not spelled out what projects it will undertake to move telecom firms along other than to say it will “address and define the high-level target architecture for telco networks based on cloud-native infrastructure, open interfaces and open source adoption.”
As welcome as that effort might be, it would seem to be a little redundant based on the Analysys Mason report, which forecasts that operators will garner roughly 18% of the total public edge cloud market by 2025.
NetFoundry pushes software-only edge embedded networking
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