DNX Executive Advisory Board Trend Session: Edge Computing

DNX has a long, successful track record related to our Customer Development value-add for our portfolio companies. Part of our secret sauce is our vast and impressive Corporate Network — both in Japan and in the US — developed over a decade. In fact, about 30 large global corporations are our fund LPs (investors), as they see a win-win in our unique approach.

One of our engagement programs is the DNX Executive Advisory Board (EAB). In the EAB, selected corporate executives exchange thoughts and insights on cutting-edge technologies with portfolio companies and the DNX Ventures team, and provide strategy, product, and go-to-market feedback. This week we hosted a very interesting EAB specifically focused on Edge Computing.

First off, we discussed ongoing macro trends. Edge computing is already in use all around us from the wearable on your wrist to the computers parsing intersection traffic flow, or smart utility grid analysis, safety monitoring of oil rigs, or drone-enabled crop management. What many forget to realize though is that the largest area for edge computing is within everyday experiences. Think about it: ad tech, gaming, entertainment content streaming, application performance logs monitoring and so on. If I order online, I want to get fast search result sets; an immediate and accurate update if an item is available; and I want to know that my purchase has been recorded and the item is on its way -quickly- before I have to get on with other things in my day.

Studies show that page load delays of, for instance, 1 second cause 7% of user transactions to be dropped. This will be a growing pain, as digitalization becomes a reality for all businesses. In a digital competitive market, customer loyalty and stickiness will land as a C-level item represented by stricter SLAs, higher resilience, and impeccable User Experience. To serve higher user experience expectations and SLAs, it will be a risk to continue the workflow to go all the way back to the cloud, and then back to the device again.

Add to that the expectation that by 2025, 75 Billion devices will be connected, up from 31 Billion in 2020, generating more data (~175 Zettabytes). Companies will struggle to keep up with SLAs and growing backend processing costs. Hence, not surprisingly, the ecosystem and innovation around edge computing have exploded over the last few years. Moving cloud processes closer to end devices and their users and creating small data centers geographically placed closer to the data source will enable analysis and processing of data with faster return.

To summarize, the big macro trends:

• More ML pushed to the Edge to serve faster decision making and more real-time personalization; and to meet higher SLAs and expectations to win in the digital market
• OT/IT integrated workflows
• Edge management and monitoring tooling to provide deployment consistency and better centralized and cost-efficient control and policy reinforcement
• Edge-improved data security
• Private 5G network adoption

After the macro trend segment, we had one of our portfolio companies present: Macrometa. This high-growth scaleup provides enterprise developers with a secure, serverless, global data cloud for building & running real-time, distributed, multi-cloud & edge apps. It was so inspiring to hear the CEO, Chetan Venkatesh, talk about the success of this unique technology innovation that has taken a write-optimized approach to serve the challenges on the edge in the most optimal way, compared to other existing databases, data platform processing, or data layer options out there. MacroMeta just announced a partnership with CloudFlare and is the next big thing in the edge space, if you ask me.

In the last segment we had an open discussion to learn from our global EAB members on their thoughts on macro trends and feedback related to Macrometa. Some of the views that came up in the lively discussions were:

• With 5G and other innovation in this space, bandwidth will no longer be the biggest challenge, instead, cost will be the biggest driver going forward.
• It will be key for organizations to select the best partner to set out on this endeavor with — to do it in the right way and to help overcome the IT/OT divide.
• The risk of adding edge to the cloud and on-prem infrastructure is that it may become too complex. If companies, such as Macrometa, can simplify the complexity and help sidestep to an easier to maintain and more scalable architecture, it will be an easy decision for CIOs going forward.

Last but not least, I would like to thank each and every one of you who spent the time with us. I am still fueled by your insights and your ideas shared at the event.