The Edge Computing Infrastructure Market: A Technology and Market Forecast 2020-2024

According to the report  Edge Computing Infrastructure Revenues will reach $17.9 billion by 2025 with an additional $1 billion in optical modules and networking to support the improved transport of edge data.

Edge computing is what’s next in data communications.  The main driver for Edge Computing Infrastructure Revenues is the need for a platform for new kinds of traffic including AI, self-driving cars, smart cities and IoT data. Edge computing enables such traffic to be siphoned from the main cloud to an edge computing network that provides the low-latency and reliability needed by a new kind of traffic.

“Latency and resiliency are important for video,” says Lawrence Gasman, President of CIR, “but for self-driving cars and IoT, these factors can literally be a matter of life and death.  The giants of computing and cloud services see edge computing as an important new source of business revenues while savvy VCs are actively searching for innovative edge computing startups to invest in.”

The goal of the report is to identify the opportunities in edge computing and to quantify them in terms of both revenues and volume shipments from 2021 to 2025.  The analysis and forecasts cover all the main parts of an edge computing network including gateways, servers, routers, and specialized software. In addition, the report also forecasts revenues for services and optical networking gear associated with edge computing. There is also a breakout by region in the report.

This report also contains strategic profiles of leading vendors and startups active in the edge computing space.  Among the companies covered are the giants of information technology, all of whom see edge computing as a major opportunity (Amazon, Cisco, Dell, Google, HPE, Huawei, Intel, Microsoft, and NVIDIA are examples here).  There are also profiles of less iconic firms active in the edge computing space - firms such as Affirmed Networks, Clear Blade, EdgeConneX, FogHorn, Kontron, MobiledgeX, Mutable, Suguna, Swim.ai, and Vapor.io.

Edge networks have been built for some time using conventional equipment.  What has changed, however, is that many of the leading vendors and service providers in this space are branding their products specifically for edge computing.  In the profiles of important players in the edge computing space, this report discusses the product/market strategies currently employed by companies active in this space.  It also discusses in some detail how 5G deployment impacts the potential deployments of edge computer networks.

From the Report

• Software dominates edge computing market: Platform, AI, and analytics software account for 45 percent of the total edge computing market. By 2025 software will produce $8.1 billion in revenues, but with intensified competition and a slew of new entrants. Edge computing software is designed to amplify the inherent advantages of edge computing.  For example, much of the platform software is open source enabling more freedom to developers to improve the customer experience.  Similarly, edge analytics can contribute to the basic goal of edge computing - speeding up data processing and decreasing latency. The critical real-time requirements will be processed at edge (device, network, or telco edge), while non-critical data will be sent back to cloud or core server for processing and storage.
• A new product category: edge data centers: The edge computing data center is a modular or containerized data centers that includes all the compute, storage, networking, power, cooling, and other infrastructure required for edge computing. In 2025 edge servers/data centers will generate $3.1 billion in revenues. They will need to be close to the end device/user (to reduce latency), as well as to perform most of the operations (storage, analysis, etc.) for local traffic.
• By 2025 edge computing services will generate $1.5 billion in revenues. This includes services as prosaic as design and engineering or acting as a one-stop solution for edge markets. But there are also more innovative services associated with edge computing, most notably the rise of edge computing-as-a-service. This is still a developing area but has already garnered the interest of leading vendors from the edge computing space, including Microsoft.