The edge journey is well underway for many organisations as they seek to connect with customers in new ways, improve operational efficiency, and adopt digital technologies to support innovation.
A combination of factors is driving this increased spending at the edge. The performance requirements of expanding workloads and new use cases that leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning demand greater compute capacity at the edge. In addition, the amount of data being stored in edge locations is rapidly expanding, and organizations plan to keep this data longer.
The survey also found that enterprises deploying edge are highly focused on building scalable businesses with investments that can contribute quickly to the bottom line. The top objectives for edge deployment are increased revenue, improved products and services, and reduced costs. But edge deployments also present important opportunities to fill a niche market or disrupt an existing market.
“Edge infrastructure deployments are shifting IT back to a more strategic, influential role within the organisation,” says Jennifer Cooke, research director: Edge Strategies at IDC. “The IT organisation is both driving and supporting critical digital-first efforts within the broader organisation.”* Organisations rank the ability to integrate edge solutions with legacy infrastructure as a key selection criterion and consider it just as important as price in edge decisions.