“Excellent!” I cried.

“Elementary,” said he.”

With any new creation of game-changing technologies, hyperbole and over-zealous marketing can run amok. Same can be said about the edge internet:

• “LatencyTime required to send data over two points in a network. More is the new currency” …
• ”AIAI is an initialism that refers to Artificial Intelligence. AI is part of many use cases within edge computing. Many AI applications require real-time decision making, which require the ultra low latency capabilities of an edge network. More at the edge is the next goldmine” …
• “Edge is the next generation of the Internet” …
• “The Internet is decentralizing” …

For some, we’re beginning to treat these cliches as fact, with constant cries of “excellent!”

“Excellent!” indeed – as the edge is now a practice across multiple organizations. The category is well defined with clear taxonomies and established value chains.

In fact, it is “excellent!” that private enterprises care about 5GThe “G” in 5G stands for generation. 5G is the fifth generation of wireless technology. 5G is characterized by bigger channels (which improves throughput), lower latencies allowing for real time applications, and the ability to connect more devices (which is increasingly important as the number of devices has grown exponentially). More and edge deeply. It is “excellent!” since multiple internet economies are beginning to form around the edge. While the size and scope of this overall economy is worth trillions of dollars over the next decade, the most “excellent!” part is the fact that these are shared economies, and the network effects are profound.

And to the yin of “excellent!,” we have the yang of “elementary.”

He said “elementary” … and the “edge is the new cloud!” Despite being a new category, it’s both natural and tempting to re-use templates from the cloud world. Clearly, it has ushered in an entirely new way to conduct business, live inside our homes, and play.

Edge is not just a trend. The pandemic has helped shine a more direct light on the edge, independent of the type of digital interaction we consume in our daily lives.

But back to “elementary” – what really is edge?

Edge is about any software workload. It’s not just about applications. Therefore we are doubling down today, and introducing our horizontal platform – Private Edge. Elsewhere[1], we had observed that one of the components of the foundational framework included new edge architectures where we reliably optimize towards a super-fast high bandwidthBandwidth is the maximum rate of data transfer across a given path. Bandwidth may be characterized as network bandwidth, data bandwidth, or digital bandwidth. It generally refers to the size of the pipe and the speed that carries the data back and forth, not necessarily the volume of traffic that passes through. More Internet, and achieve single-digit, millisecond internet latencies at any layer. That’s the premise of our company and the opportunity we can provide to the world.

Riding on that theme, we all seek ways to accelerate economic outcomes at the edge. There’s an immediate need to eliminate both technology and business friction and create a scalable shared economic paradigm. The good news: there is now a common understanding that a distributed, neutral host, edge APIApplication Programmatic Interface An intermediary between two Applications/Systems or Generic Connectivity Interface to an Application. Software applications communicate with one another via APIs. Learn more about APIs and Private Networks More consumption model is an imperative – and it has the disruptive potential to impact multiple trillion-dollar industries.

What this means is we’re moving into a new world of “Edge-onomics.”

What is Edge-onomics? It’s a shared platform to explore ideas that lead to tangible economic understandings at the edge.

Why Edge-onomics? Because we know who cares and why now!

We’ll be exploring in more depth what Edge-onomics means to businesses, developers, partners, and the average person that will be impacted by edge computing and technology moving forward.

To make this movement accelerate and rise the tides, we invite edge practitioners to collaborate and contribute to our collective understanding. We can’t wait for what’s to come. Welcome to the edge economy.

[1] Ganesh Sundaram, “The Edge Internet: Sparking a reconfiguration,” Connected Intelligence 2030.