MobiledgeX has facilitated integrations between developers and device makers and large mobile operators, and the new release of their platform is designed to enable enterprises to do the same thing.
Edge computing company MobiledgeX is targeting the enterprise edge with their MobiledgeX Edge-Cloud 2.0. The new release of their platform is specifically focused on providing the same cloud integration services to enterprises that the company’s platform initially provided to telecoms.
MobiledgeX was formed in 2018 through Deutsche Telekom, and established as an independent company to fill what they had determined was a key void in the market.
“With the coming of 5G, Deutsche Telekom did internal strategy work which was quite detailed, and which led them to understand that edge computing was an important enabler to capitalize on,” said Geoff Hollingworth, MobiledgeX’s Chief Marketing Officer. “However, they also realized that they were missing a key part of the ecosystem. To capitalize on 5G, they had to expose their assets to developers and new device makers – and this was something that all telecoms had to do.”
Connecting developers with the mobile networks in this way wasn’t something that one of the mobile networks could realistically do themselves, and so MobiledgeX was created as a separate company. It also had a different focus from a telco, and a different customer set.
“Early on we realized the last thing telecoms needed was another infrastructure vendor trying to sell them more equipment,” Hollingworth said. “What they needed is monetize other streams of revenue It was also a very different company from a telecom company, in that the focus was on cloud-native developers.”
Accordingly, the first two strategic decisions they made were to not build any infrastructure, and to not sell to telecoms.
Geoff Hollingworth, MobiledgeX’s CMO
“We have a software infrastructure, so the operator can use Red Hat and Cisco like Deutsche Telekom, or VMware, or anything, as long as they give us an IaaS platform,” Hollingworth said. “We automatically discover the resources that exist in their locations. Our model is to make it easy for developers and device makers to get access to services. Our customers are the application developers, new devices makers and the enterprises using those services. Those are the people who pay us.”
MobiledgeX works closely with the telcos in order to reach their developers and potential developers.
“Deutsche Telekom helped introduce us to all the telcos around the world,” Hollingworth noted. “That’s how we wound up working closely with people in Canada. Telus is one of the most aggressive and proactive mobile operators there in terms of trying to develop the marketplace.”
Telus is a member of MobiledgeX’s Early Access Program, which is designed to let developers to build, experiment, and test applications and experiences using MobiledgeX’s technology.
“The purpose of that Early Access Program is twofold – finding companies who want to use the edge, and understanding what’s needed in a platform,” Hollingworth said. “it reflects that fact that this isn’t a normal co-development kind of world.”
MobiledgeX also works closely with global integrator WWT, which provides blueprints for industry-specific vertical applications to customers to allow them to commercialize scalable mobile deployments
“We work closely with WWT as our primary integrator, to put our software together with others and make sure everything works correctly,” Hollingworth indicated. “We do worth with some others, mainly in places where WWT doesn’t work, but WWT is the one who we want to prove our model with. We see 2020 as the year of the edge, and WWT as the partner to make that happen.”
The MobiledgeX Edge-Cloud 2.0 is also extremely significant in building out the company’s market, because it takes it beyond the telco public edge base where they began.
“In our 1.0 release we focused on enabling edge exposure and services for telecom operators,” Hollingworth stressed. “For the 2.0 release, we realized that many large enterprises also want to be a service provider to their own customers, and there’s no real difference between those and telcos serving their customers. So 2.0 extends us to support the enterprise edge seamlessly with the public edge.”
One of the key changes involves being able to manage both of these infrastructure types, the private [enterprise] infrastructure and the distributed public [operator, cloud] infrastructure through the same pane of glass.
“It is possible to manage both private and public through the same console,” Hollingworth said. “We have also included declarative policy-driven deployments as well.” These let ISV applications be deployed with seamless failover to enable high availability
“We have also improved security and privacy, with a federated control panel approach that lets you execute policy controls in application data for particularly locations” he added. “This could be if you have sensitive data that an enterprise wants to keep on-prem, or data that is desired to be kept within a specific country.”
The console and command line interface (CLI) for management, operation, and introspection of edge operations have also been enhanced, to improve the console’s self-service capabilities.
