5G, industry, and collaboration at the edge

Tuesday, 10 August 2021 11:23

5G, industry, and collaboration at the edge

Chris Wright, Red Hat senior VP and chief technology officer

GUEST OPINION by Chris Wright Red Hat senior VP and chief technology officer: Edge computing is giving life to transformative use cases that businesses are dreaming up today and bringing real-time decision making to last-mile locales.

This can include a far-flung factory or train roaring down the tracks, someone’s connected home, or their car speeding down the highway. Or even in space. Edge is large and fast-moving, and global collaboration allows us to transform the way we live and push the industry forward, particularly with 5G innovation.

Continued collaboration, however, is necessary to keep enabling breakthrough successes. Across industries and organisations, we are all highly dependent on one another. For example, with the telecommunications and industrial sector, there is a mutually supportive, symbiotic relationship between these industries—5G development cannot be successful without industrial use cases, which, in turn, are based on telco technologies. But numerous challenges remain, including reducing network complexity.

Why Collaboration Is Critical

Edge technologies are blending the digital and physical worlds in a new way, and that combination is resonating at a human level. A great example is when we use AR/VR to improve safety on the factory floor. maintaining security, improving agility, and ensuring a vibrant ecosystem. And the only way to address and solve those is by tapping into the collective wisdom of the community.

Open source has been and continues to be the innovation engine for industry. The open source ecosystem brings people together to focus on a common problem to solve with software. That shared purpose can turn isolated efforts into collective ones so that changes are industry-wide and reflect a wide range of needs and values.

If we collaborate with 5G and edge in this manner, nascent technologies could become exciting common foundations much sooner than if everyone worked by themselves.

From Maps to Apps and Much More

Do you remember having to use a paper-based map to figure out driving directions? Flash forward to today: the applications on phones and in our homes are so ingrained in our day-to-day life that they allow us to change our driving route in real time to avoid traffic. They shape how people interact within their environments and with others. Yet not too long ago, many of these things were unimaginable. Cloud technology was only just taking off, the industry was in transition from 3G to 4G, and smartphones were new.

But there was important work being done to improve upon the core technologies. The convergence of three technology trends, as it turns out, unlocked a hugely disruptive opportunity: a cloud-native, mobile-device-enabled transportation service that picked you up wherever you were, and took you wherever you wanted to go.

This opportunity was only possible because each trend built on the others to create a truly novel offering. Without one of these trends, the applications from the ride-sharing apps of the world would not have been the same or as disruptive. Imagine yourself scrambling to find a Wi-Fi hotspot on the street corner, whipping out your laptop outside a restaurant while standing in the rain, or starting your business by first constructing a massive data-centre. The convergence of smartphones, 4G networks, and cloud computing has enabled a new world.

Today, we are creating the next set of technologies that will become the things so embedded in our lives and so indispensable to our daily habits that we will wonder what we ever did without them.

The possibilities with edge technologies are equally as exciting. It starts with the marriage of the digital world with the physical world. Adding in pervasive connectivity and leveraging a common 5G and edge platform can transform how operational technologies interact with the physical world.

The Future Is Now

Open source has empowered collaboration, and working together has helped people across organisations and industries build more robust, shared platforms more quickly and differentiate on top of them. This collaboration ignites tremendous change and alters the future in many ways. Expect these new technologies to have profound implications for society—in our daily lives, how we interact with one another, and the social fabric of our world.

If you’re interested in understanding more about edge computing, check out our offering at Red Hat.

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