Another Technology Wave

Amid all the hype, hope, and handwringing about artificial intelligence (AI), another technology tide has quietly been rising, and attracting massive amounts of investment.

It's all around us and keeps proliferating unabated -- in sensors, trackers, production machines, appliances, wearables, vehicles, and buildings. Welcome to the edge, which is likely to shape and shift our jobs and businesses before AI makes its mark. Many of the devices and products seen here at ZDNET represent the edge wave.

The edge and Internet of Things (IoT) are big business. At least 23% of respondents to a survey from the Eclipse Foundation say they spent between $100,000 to $1m on IoT and edge in 2022, and 33% expect to spend this much in 2023. 

One in 10 anticipate spending more than $10m in 2023. More than half (53%) of enterprises currently deploy IoT solutions, with an additional 24% planning to introduce them within the next 12 to 24 months.

Hybrid cloud is the vehicle on which edge projects are riding. At least 42% of respondents suggest that edge deployments are made possible by hybrid cloud. The intersection of edge and the cloud -- typically seen as polar opposites in technology landscapes -- has not been lost on cloud vendors, especially Amazon Web Services (AWS).

"More and more new use cases and customer requirements have increased the need to have edge computing on top of cloud," says Yasser Alsaied, vice president of IoT for AWS, in a discussion with ZDNET. "Edge infrastructure is important for companies that want their applications closer to their users."  READ MORE...