2021: Cloudy with a Chance of Edge
The disruption of 2020 has created a new mix of challenges and opportunities for B2B telecoms. While we’ve seen our telecom partners branch into new markets, with offerings ranging from managed public cloud services to data sovereign regional clouds, we also saw obstacles arise (such as disruption and delays within the hardware supply chain) that impacted the timing of the roll out of next generation connectivity (5G) and computing (edge) technologies.
In 2021, CloudMC will be focused on the edge of the cloud industry. We expect to see more than a handful of service providers begin down the path of (re-)entering the cloud computing value chain through the evolving Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) and distributed computing landscape. These service providers won’t do this by dreaming up potential use-cases in meetings with vendors, but rather by engaging their customers and prospects around the ways they can enhance their experiences.
Through their use of CloudMC, our Canadian cloud partner, cloud.ca, began to demonstrate the commercial viability of localized computing through a variety of early edge adoption use-cases.
Private Edge Deployment
A Canadian Healthcare Institution had big data processing needs based on their clinical, administrative, research and genotyping data. They required elastic compute and storage, with a guaranteed jurisdictional compliance (ie. the data had to be exclusively subject to Canadian jurisdiction, and thus, the hyperscale clouds could not be an option). Our Canadian cloud partner delivered a dedicated private edge infrastructure stack as-a-service on the premises of the healthcare institution, enabling their researchers to be able to efficiently perform data analysis.
VDI at the Edge - Enabling Distributed Workforce
An International Gaming Company had strict data privacy needs and power users (ie. game developers and game testers) who required high-powered, low latency digital workspaces. Their existing virtual desktop interface (VDI) was hosted by their vendor in the US and was resulting in a degradation of experience (ie. 20% of sessions had 51-100ms of latency and 10% of sessions with over 100ms of latency) for their workforce in Canada. After extensive testing and validation, our Canadian cloud partner delivered GPU-enabled, digital workspaces on their cloud infrastructure, which was much closer to the users. This solution reduced latency to between 15-30ms, and provided their game developers and testers the user experience they required to evolve their upcoming games.
Edge-to-Cloud Networking
An American Climate Change Research Institution had big data processing needs based on their climate simulation and satellite image analysis. They were using a mixture of on-premises infrastructure and a hyperscale cloud, and wanted to optimize their computing costs and standardize how and where they process and store their data. Our Canadian cloud partner delivered a solution that enabled their researchers to work more efficiently with a standardized data processing pipeline, and cost optimization with a software-defined cloud connect between the storage from a Canadian cloud and elastic compute from a hyperscale cloud.
While the roadmap to the edge is not linear, we wrapped up the year by sharing our experiences and lessons learned from early edge adoption at The Edge Event, and collaborated with leading analysts at STL Partners and Omdia to release sponsored reports on “Making the Cloud a Commercial Success for Telcos” and “Growing B2B Revenues from Edge: Five New Telco Services”.
Looking ahead, we are going to see telecoms continue to make investments into their edge-to-cloud innovation ecosystem through technology and services partnerships, platform choices, and proof of concepts of their burgeoning capabilities. To support these efforts, our CloudMC software business will be announcing new software delivery models (to reduce the operational burden of delivering, operating and monetizing distributed computing services), new edge technology partnerships (enabling geographically distributed data, computing and content delivery services), and new customer adoption (that will demonstrate our software’s growth in adoption among service providers operationalizing their B2B cloud offerings, as well as leading edge opportunities, such as the first-to-market launch of multi-tenant network edge services).
Stay tuned for our upcoming announcements! Reach out to learn more about how we can collaborate to enable your organization to refine your go-to-market strategy, assemble your innovation ecosystem, and deliver, operate and monetize your portfolio of edge-to-cloud services.