Transforming Network Infrastructure Drives New Consortium
Engaging in a major task like transforming network infrastructure isn't easy on a good day, and as the network gets more complex with new tools to add to it and new uses for old tools, the degree of difficulty only gets worse. Recently, the Edge Computing Consortium (ECC) was officially established, and brought together several firms around the world to help make better sense of this growing market and better establish change therein.
The new ECC features some big names in the technology field, ranging from Intel to ARM to Huawei Technologies, as well as some academic names like the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT). With all of these in place, the group could focus on its primary purpose: establishing a cooperative platform for edge computing users that encourages more open development in both operational technology (OT) and information and communications technology (ICT).
The open development platform is good enough, but the ECC is going farther still by fostering the growth of industry best practices, and by
encouraging further development in the edge computing market as a whole. With industries restructuring even as more companies seek to transform network infrastructure, that means both a lot of opportunities and potential for failure, a point the ECC hopes to drive down by providing clearer focus on where to develop operations.
ECC chairman and director of the Shenyang Institute of Automation at the Chinese Academy of Science Yu Haibin commented, “Industrial automation technology systems will evolve from layered architecture and information silos to IoT, cloud computing, and Big Data analytics architecture. Amidst the evolution, edge computing will bolster distributed industrial automatic self-control architecture. Therefore, the ECC will keep an eye on the design of the architecture and the choice of technical roadmap, as well as promoting industrial development through standardization. In addition, building an ecosystem will also be focused.”
A field like transforming network infrastructure necessarily has a lot of points; while it's possible to transform a network just by adding a new feature, that's really an underwhelming sort of transformation. In fact, it's not much of a transformation at all. So there are a lot of different facets of the field, and edge computing is both a major facet and one that contains several sub-facets itself.
That means an organization devoted to its development is a reasonable response to a market that would otherwise be changing so rapidly that no one would be particularly sure where it's going, and the ECC can serve a great role in providing some basic guidelines and boundaries. That alone makes this an organization to be reckoned with, and a big value in the field.
Edited by Alicia Young
