New Statistics from The Eclipse Foundation Indicate that Edge Computing Adoption Continues to Boom

Monday, June 14, 2021

The Eclipse Foundation, one of the world’s largest open-source foundations, recently announced the availability of its 2021 IoT and Edge Commercial Adoption Survey report, based on an online survey of more than 300 IoT and edge professionals conducted from January 12 to March 15, 2021, with the survey participants representing a broad set of industries, organizations, and job functions.

The survey’s objective is to gain a better understanding of the IoT and edge computing ecosystems by identifying the requirements, priorities, and challenges faced by organizations that deploy and use commercial solutions.

The report indicates that both IoT and Edge investment is continuing on a signi?cant upwards trend. IoT technologies are being adopted at an accelerated rate, with 47 percent of respondents currently deploying IoT solutions and an additional 39 percent planning to deploy them within the next 12 to 24 months.

Edge computing adoption is also picking up pace. 54 percent of organizations are either utilizing or planning to utilize edge computing technologies within 12 months, and another 30 percent have plans to evaluate Edge deployments over the next 12 to 24 months.

According to the report, more organizations now see IoT and Edge as strategic, with 35 percent of these spending decisions being driven at the executive level, nearly doubling the 18 percent indicated by our 2019 survey. 30 percent of respondents project spending between one hundred thousand and $1 million, a 2X increase over 2019, while 16 percent anticipate spending over $1 million, a 25 percent increase over 2019.

However, the report also found that there are myriad operational challenges when it comes to using IoT and edge technology. The top 3 IoT and Edge operational challenges found involve end-to-end IoT solution monitoring and management, device management, and network, devices, and data security.

We caught up with William Hurley, CRO of Veea, an edge computing and communications company that was recently identified by Gartner as a “Cool Vendor” In the Edge Computing category, to see how they are tackling these operational challenges with IoT, Industrial IoT, and edge technology.

Hurley said Veea is focused on simplification at the network edge. “With the Veea Edge Platform’s integrated, comprehensive approach to edge computing and connectivity, multi-vendor integration challenges and system complexity are dramatically reduced, resulting in faster deployment, increased flexibility, and reduced costs.”

The Veea Edge Platform securely connects, monitors, and manages a range of IoT and IIoT devices and sensors; locally collects, stores, and operates on the data they generate; accelerates and enhances your edge analytics, ML models, AI-based and algorithmic-driven business decisions; and enables real-time automation and orchestration of edge operations and workloads.

“With a Veea Edge Platform in place, organizations can simultaneously support multi-WAN connectivity, both wireless 4G/LTE and wired, to the internet and public/private clouds, while simultaneously connecting to IoT and user devices,” Hurley explained. “And the platform’s integrated 4G cellular wireless WAN option includes global service coverage for rapid deployment, while also supporting both Peer-to-Peer (P2P) communications and Zero Trust Networking (ZTN), for a secure network.”

Hurley went on to state that Veea’s VeeaHub Smart Edge Nodes form the foundation of the Veea Edge Platform and help combat the common operational challenges associated with IoT and the edge. VeeaHubs can be managed locally or remotely, with a centralized, remote user interface for executing system software updates, installing applications, or managing edge-stored content. VeeaHubs leverage a secure “root of trust” architecture to prevent hacker intrusion and malware and are also Certified for Microsoft Azure IoT, allowing adopters to benefit from a wide range of IoT applications available on the Microsoft Azure IoT Marketplace.

“VeeaHubs wirelessly interconnect to provide a dynamic connectivity and application mesh which is easily deployed and scaled and centrally managed from the cloud,” said Hurley. “They integrate a full range of connectivity options, application processing power, and a full security stack to deliver secure edge computing and connectivity for IoT/IIoT/AIoT and a wide range of smart applications.”

Finally, according to the Eclipse report, there is a strategy trend towards hybrid clouds, with 44 percent of respondents suggesting that IoT deployments are using or will use a hybrid cloud architecture composed of two or more distinct cloud infrastructures, such as private and public. This represents a 2x increase from the 22 percent in 2019.  However, Hurley stated that The Veea Edge Platform readily supports not only multi-cloud but also edge/core hybrid cloud architectures by virtue of its use of secure container technology at the network edge. With compute capacity at the network edge, the flexibility to support these architectures is only limited by the developer’s imagination.

According to Hurley, “Veea’s unique Wi-Fi and IoT device networking and computing mesh technology, vMesh, offers high-performance, self-healing, and self-organizing capabilities, and works for hybrid wired and wireless LANs while offering an extensive range of Wi-Fi coverage with extended multi-hop capability and low latency. In combination with the powerful vBus abstraction layer, it is possible for a software application running on any mesh-connected VeeaHub to connect to, communicate with, and control IoT/IIoT devices connected to any other VeeaHub on the mesh. Extending an application’s reach or adding more devices to the system is as simple as plugging in another VeeaHub. Compared to wired mesh solutions, a wireless vMesh implementation significantly reduces the costs associated with running structured cabling. In fact, these cabling costs are often far greater than the cost of the Veea Platform equipment.”

As the findings from the Eclipse Foundation show, enterprises are putting their foot on the accelerator when it comes to adopting the latest IoT and edge computing technology. And as the world becomes more digital with every passing day, Hurley states that more innovation in IoT and edge technology is sure to come.

“Veea is redefining and simplifying secure edge computing that improves application responsiveness, reduces bandwidth costs, and eliminates central cloud dependency,” Hurley said. “We are proud to not only be considered ‘Cool’ by Gartner but also to be making edge-driven digital transformation a reality.”