S1E07: The Future of Edge is Messier Than You Think

Episode Summary:

Today’s episode features an interview between Matt Trifiro and Dean Bubley, Founder and Director of Disruptive Analysis

Dean is an independent technology industry analyst, futurist, speaker and consultant with over 25 years of experience.

In this interview, Dean gives us his unfiltered views on Edge, IoT, 5G, their intersection with the telecoms industry, and why the future is going to be a lot messier than you think.

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Key Quotes:

“Everything is going to be a messy hybrid; deeply inelegant and based on sort of midterm pragmatism, messed up by acquisitions, with awkwardness around local authorities and this real mess of overlapping jurisdictions and property rights and incumbency. It's going to be messy.”

“My main perspective is that latency is perhaps not the be all and end all we thought it was initially. And that actually it’s things like data sovereignty, security and control by enterprise, and this idea of interconnection is more important than people thought it was a few years ago.”

“One thing I often have a conversation with people about on edge is trying to calibrate where they are on the scale. I often say that edge has maybe nine orders of magnitude. I've spoken to people who think of edge as a megawatt data center in a tier three city. Down to other people who think it's a milliwatt processor on a chip, on a sensor. And so I'm like, right, you've got nine orders of magnitude, all of which people think that's the edge.”

“A lot of my clients are in telecoms and I think they will end up being both sellers and buyers of edge compute. The telecoms industry has to wake up this idea that actually there’s a marketplace, and sometimes it makes sense to be on the buying side and sometimes it makes sense to be on the selling side.”

“As much as all telcos chest thump about how they're all building out their 5G networks, it's incredibly expensive and the CFO's office often has a very different opinion than the marketing team's office. What I see as a really big opportunity is shared infrastructure because the economics is so compelling.”

“The assumption in the mobile industry is that the edge goes in the network. I actually think that possibly the network goes in the edge, and actually what you might find is these localized data centers that have chunks of each of many different network operators infrastructure in a neutral colo. And so it almost turns the paradigm around.”

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Links:

Connect with Matt on LinkedIn

Follow Dean on Twitter