RESEARCH BRIEF: Bringing Intelligence to the Cloud Edge

The telecommunications industry is moving to cloud-based technologies at the network edge to help tackle the explosion of mobile video consumption, service mobility, virtualization of Customer-Premise Equipment (CPE), the Internet of Things (IoT), and other latency-sensitive applications. But unfortunately today, much of the compute still happens at the center of the network or on the client device. This situation results in more traffic, higher latency, and less flexibility. Moving processing closer together—away from the two furthest points where it happens today, the network core and the client, toward the network edge and aggregation layers—can speed deployment and reduce TCO for carriers. In these environments, flexible general-purpose compute will drive the most value.

If “data is the new currency”, then positioning compute should be like choosing an oil well site: as close to the resource as possible, yet comprehending the geographic transport issues.

Executive Summary
The Changing Carrier Landscape
Optimizing for More Flexible and Cost-effective Compute
Focusing Investment
Building Agnostic, Standardized Infrastructures
Silicon Platform Requirements
Optimizing the Network
Figure 1: Moving Compute Brings Significant Benefits to Carriers

You can download the paper here.

Companies Cited

Altera
AMD
Applied Micro
ARM
Avago
Broadcom
Cavium
Cisco
Comcast
Freescale
Hi-Silicon
IBM
IDC
Marvell
Netronome
Oracle
PMC Sierra
Telefonica
TI
Qualcomm
Xilinx

Patrick Moorhead

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Patrick founded the firm based on his real-world world technology experiences with the understanding of what he wasn’t getting from analysts and consultants. Ten years later, Patrick is ranked #1 among technology industry analysts in terms of “power” (ARInsights) in “press citations” (Apollo Research). Moorhead is a contributor at Forbes and frequently appears on CNBC. He is a broad-based analyst covering a wide variety of topics including the cloud, enterprise SaaS, collaboration, client computing, and semiconductors. He has 30 years of experience including 15 years of executive experience at high tech companies (NCR, AT&T, Compaq, now HP, and AMD) leading strategy, product management, product marketing, and corporate marketing, including three industry board appointments.