Twelve Days of Sunlight 2022

Published in

sunlight.io

5 min readDec 15, 2022

This holiday season, we recognise that there are many people struggling to keep up with the cost of living and noone should ever have to choose between heating their homes and feeding their families. For this reason we have decided to support two very special charities instead of giving out gifts and cards: The Trussell Trust and Houston Food Bank.

And because we still want to give you something before we end the year — here are twelve of our 2022 highlights in the form of a traditional carol.

On the twelfth day of ’22, Sunlight gave to me…

Twelve+ recipes in our marketplace
Eleven+ pilot projects
Ten Gartner reports
Nine-day fortnights
Eight hardware & software bundles
Seven system updates
Six+ new partners
5-G Open Innovation Lab
Four award wins
Three investors
Two partners for our AI program
And a new CEO

Twelve+ recipes in our Marketplace

The Sunlight Marketplace is a component of Sunlight Infrastructure Manager (SIM). It is designed to enable Sunlight users to fully automate the end-to-end deployment of application environments utilising the optimum performance offered by the Sunlight platform. The Sunlight Marketplace is leveraging the power of the Ansible framework to manage the deployment of applications.

Since June we have added over 12 recipes to the marketplace. Recent applications include Litmus.io, WaitTimes, Avassa, Ori and Onteon.

Find out more about the Sunlight Marketplace.

Eleven+ pilot projects

Edge Computing is enabling a lot of the latest technologies and innovations utilizing new AI, Computer Vision, IoT and analytics technologies. At Sunlight, we’ve been fortunate to work on these latest advancements — examples include analyzing traffic patterns in airports; improving customer experiences in restaurants; reducing latency on manufacturing production lines; enabling connectivity for soldiers in remote locations; speeding up data processing in rainforests; AI drug testing in hospitals, clinics and labs. We can’t wait to be able to share these use cases in more detail with you.

Ten Gartner reports

In May we announced Sunlight had been named a 2022 Gartner® Cool Vendor in Edge Computing by Gartner analysts Bob Gill, Tom Bittman, and Sandeep Unni. Sunlight is one of four Cool Vendors identified in the report published on 23rd May 2022 that are solving the primary edge computing challenges.

In addition, this year Sunlight featured in Market Guides for Edge Computing, and Server Virtualization; Hype Cycles for Compute, Edge Computing, Managed IT Services, Cloud Platform Services, and Mid-sized Enterprises; an Emerging Tech Impact Radar; and a piece of Innovation Insight.

Nine-day fortnights

New research from global trials suggests that companies with employees working a four-day week experienced an improvement in overall productivity and output. So, In October, Sunlight announced that we will also put the research to the test — starting with a nine-day fortnight which allows employees to have every second Friday off — with no loss in pay, holiday or other benefits. It is still early days but the results so far are promising.

Eight hardware & software bundles

Edge infrastructure company Sunlight.io announced it has launched an Edge-as-a-Service digital storefront with Avnet Integrated. The storefront provides Sunlight.io channel partners with a portal to easily order pre-configured edge infrastructure solutions, complete with hardware, software, and centralized management, to any location across EMEA — and soon to anywhere in the world.

The partnership between Sunlight and Avnet Integrated delivers an e-commerce platform where an edge server, such as the Lenovo SE350 or Supermicro E300, can be ordered pre-installed with the Sunlight platform, pre-configured, and delivered directly to the edge locations required. The client then simply plugs the device into the network and powers it on at each location; the edge devices will securely connect to the central management dashboard and be installed with the correct applications. The storefront offers a choice of eight certified and tested platforms that are sized for common workloads. This method takes the guesswork out of choosing the right platform for applications.

Seven system updates

In 2022, Sunlight’s engineering team released seven system updates and three full product releases. These include a lot of new features and improvements to the API, Sunlight Infrastructure Manager (SIM), SIM User Interface (UI), dashboard, installer, QA, general performance and security features.

You can deep dive into the updates and releases on Sunlight’s docs website.

Six+ new partners

Sunlight embraces an ecosystem of skilled partners who can deliver maximum value to their customers. A Sunlight partner provides an end-to-end edge solution for any workload and application. We have a focused number of reseller and distribution partners to ensure we can provide a quality service and maintain incentive levels. Partners include 3i, Alchemy, Atom IT, Avnet Integrated, Insight, ITSS, Lunarweb, P1 Technologies, Paladin, Recarta, Safozi, Veristor.

We support our partners to succeed in numerous ways. Find out more about the Sunlight Partner Program.

5-G Open Innovation Lab

In September, we announced our participation in the 5G Open Innovation Lab (The 5G OI Lab) Fall program, alongside three new corporate partnerships and 15 other multi-stage startups. As a part of the 5G OI Lab ecosystem we are delivering disruptive new enterprise technologies and solutions that capitalize on the power of edge computing and 5G.

Four award wins

Sunlight received recognition throughout the year for our contributions to cloud excellence, Quick Service Restaurant (QSR) digital solutions, Edge innovation and Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning. Our wins include:

Three investors

We recently welcomed a new investor to the Sunlight board — bringing the total number of Sunlight investors to three. Want to find out more? You will have to wait until the new year.

Two partners for our AI program

Sunlight is a Lenovo Innovator Program partner and an NVIDIA Inception member. In June we announced support for the NVIDIA Jetson™ edge AI platform, and the Lenovo SE70, with the launch of our beta program — ‘Project Rosie.’ Sunlight NexVisor is the first full hyperconverged stack to support the Arm-CPU-based NVIDIA Jetson. Sunlight NexVisor coupled with the Lenovo SE70 makes it easy to deploy AI applications anywhere at the edge. Application developers can be the first to access the technology and test their AI applications by applying here.

And a new CEO

In November, we welcomed Sunlight’s new CEO, Tom Flink. Tom brings a wealth of experience in the Deep Tech space. He is a great addition to our leadership team — alongside Andy Brewerton, Julian Chesterfield and Thanassis Zografos.

Looking ahead to 2023, we’re excited to see what another twelve months of Sunlight will bring for our people, customers, partners and investors.

Thanks for being with us on this journey!

Twelve Days of Sunlight 2022

Written by Hannah Mellow