While it remains unclear exactly what the Edge is, the market will grow solidly. IDC expects revenue growth of 14.8 percent compared to 2021.
The Edge market will have total sales of $176 billion by 2022. That’s what IDC predicts. Compared to 2021, the market will thus grow by 14.8 percent. “Edge computing continues to gain momentum as digital organizations look for innovation outside the data center,” IDC Research Vice President Dave McCarthy said of it.
What is Edge?
The prediction comes as no surprise. Just about every provider of IT solutions and products agrees that there is a lot to like about the Edge. That translates into new hardware and software from manufacturers of all kinds. What the violins are not tuned about is what exactly the Edge is.
The overall approach is clear though: if it’s in the data center, it’s not in the Edge. Edge computing primarily includes solutions that are close to where data is generated. So the initial data processing can be done on-site and possibly already produce results, without having to move all the data to the cloud. This is faster (lower latency) and saves on network costs. For example, an Edge server in a factory can thus raise alarms based on sensor data, without that data first having to go to a central data center for processing.
Where the boundary lies is less clear. For example, there is a solid overlap between what we mean by IoT and Edge. Is a sensor that processes its own data an Edge device or just a smart IoT device? In practice, the Edge is thus a hotchpotch of various IT solutions that are not in a data center, and are not an endpoint.
Investments in various sectors
IDC expects 2022 investments in Edge applications in manufacturing, asset management, logistics and freight, intelligent transportation and smart utility networks. There’s a lot of intelligence to inject there, though again it’s not clear exactly what it’s about. You can bet that IDC expects a lot of servers to appear on site in the coming year to process data there.
Those who used to put a server in a satellite location may not have thought about it. Today, we call such a thing an Edge investment, and manufacturers build hardware specifically for it. Think easier maintenance but also more robust enclosures: since the Edge, by definition, is not a data center, the environment is more challenging for IT hardware.