Building a Vertical Business with Edge Cloud and an Open Ecosystem
Award-winning MEF PoC highlights new vertical markets and use cases for CSPs.
There are many compelling services that will benefit from edge cloud platforms to maximize service performance at the lowest cost. For example, video surveillance or face recognition applications need to capture and process vast amounts of data, making it too costly to send all this data to the public cloud. And real-time applications such as AR/VR collaboration and automated industrial visual inspection can’t sustain more than tens of milliseconds of latency.
While large enterprises in diverse vertical industries can build and manage these services on-premise, for the majority of enterprises with small IT teams, this is not a feasible option due to significant cost and complexity.
With decades of technology and commercial expertise, emerging 5G networks and cloud platforms as well as broad industry standards, CSPs have the piece parts to build a viable business in new vertical markets and capitalize on the opportunity. However, it’s a complex offering that requires strong industry collaboration and a large, open ecosystem including public cloud partners and specialized technology vendors.
Orchestrated Multi-Edge Cloud
This was the motivation for Netcracker to team up with industry leading players NTT Communications, Microsoft, Juniper and ADVA and create ‘Orchestrated Multi-Edge Cloud,’ a MEF Proof of Concept (PoC) that recently received the Market Game Changer award from MEF. This recognition acknowledges the PoC’s potential impact on service providers by highlighting prospective new vertical markets and use cases.
Using MEF’s LSO framework to facilitate integration, CSP edge services, such as SD-WAN or 5G core, could be hosted on public cloud edge platforms, and third-party applications, including Microsoft’s IoT hub, could be hosted on a CSP edge platform. This was made possible due to Netcracker’s Edge Orchestration and Service Orchestration solutions, which dynamically place resources at the optimal edge location with automated deployment, assurance and full lifecycle management.
The PoC demonstrates Netcracker’s commitment to accelerating the adoption of edge cloud services and seizing the opportunities of the new 5G world.
For more details, MEF’s latest blog answers many questions posed by CSPs from a recent live showcase event.