Joanna Newman, Vodafone on The Real Impact of Mobile Edge Computing

Global Edge Computing and 5G Principal Manager, Network Strategy and Architecture at Vodafone, Joanna Newman discusses the real impact of mobile edge computing.

Guest Bio:  Joanna is a highly motivated senior manager who is  passionate about Strategy, Innovation and Transformation as enablers for successful businesses. She’s had the pleasure of working globally (4 continents and counting), delivering big portfolios of world leading innovative capabilities to the Enterprise and Consumer Technology and Telco markets, as well as digital transformation initiatives to migrate to Agile, DevOps, and Cloud.

Transcript

Jo Peterson: 0:39

Hi, thank you so much for joining the elevate the edge Podcast. I'm Jo Peterson. I'm the vice president of cloud and security for clarify 360 and I'm here with our amazing guest, Joanna Newman. Hey, Joanna.

Joanna Newman: 0:54

Hi, thank you so much for having me, Jo

Jo Peterson: 0:56

Oh, we're lucky to have you. Thank you. Joanna is the Senior Director for Technology Partnerships for Vodafone. Let me take a minute and tell you a little bit about Joanna's background. She's a highly motivated senior director who's passionate about strategy, innovation and transformation as enablers for successful businesses. She's had the pleasure of working globally, four continents and counting, delivering big portfolios of world leading innovative capabilities to enterprise and consumer technology and telco markets, as well as digital transformation initiatives to migrate to Agile DevOps and the cloud. Welcome, Joanna,

Joanna Newman: 1:39

thank you so much for having me, Jo. It's a real pleasure to be here.

Jo Peterson: 1:42

So today, we're going to talk about the real impact of mobile edge computing. Let's dig right in the global mobile edge computing market size was 732 point 9 million in 2021. And it's projected to be 1.9 billion with a B by 2030. What are some of the factors driving almost sort of a tripling of growth in an 11 year period?

Joanna Newman: 2:08

Yes, and that's a great question. And one of the one of the things about edge computing is just the speed and pace and scale at which it's growing, which is reflected in those numbers. So really, what will help deliver that is three elements. So the first is is that the broader adoption of edge in, in manufacturing facilities and other industries that delivers ultra low latency use cases that have not been available before, really delivering value and new capabilities for businesses, which can lower costs, increased revenue, do both abstract costs out of the organization, etc. So the first one is about the scale of the adoption of those use cases in those types of situations or on premise edge computing. The second is the maturity of the wider ecosystem. So at the moment, the ecosystem is very healthy. 700 plus million is not to be sniffed out for a year. But the ecosystem is itself developing and maturing as well. So when Vodafone one an IBC award for a champion, which demonstrated an end to end use case of location based XR, so that's AR and VR together for game called Haddow. If you've never come across it, take a look, it's the fastest growing esport in the world at the moment, it actually took eight different companies to demonstrate that end to end use case, because the ecosystem is still a little bit fragmented. So one of the things that will deliver that growth is actually the that ecosystem maturing. And the third one is for new use cases to come online. At the moment, what we're seeing is we're seeing use cases that are being provided on prem because of the capability of ultra low latency, responsiveness, that helping visual inspection that helps in worker safety helps in augmented reality, etc. But there are new use cases that haven't even been developed yet, that will really take advantage of the technologies that edge computing provides, and the connectivity and capability that mobile networks already provide, that will bring us new use cases that we can only perceive of at the moment. And those are really the three ingredients that together will deliver that or even higher. Now, some might come faster, some might come slower, but those are the real ingredients to help deliver it.

Jo Peterson: 4:29

I believe with absolutely what you're saying about the ecosystem. And I think that some of who ends up in the ecosystem is actually going to drive different product adoptions. Would you agree?

Joanna Newman: 4:42

Absolutely. And it's about the maturity of that ecosystem, as well as as the little fish get eaten by the bigger fish, etc, to produce those capabilities so that they can all work in an end to end way. And one of the things that Vodafone's focusing on is an edge innovation program that we've operated for more than two years now. And we you know, there's other organizations globally that are doing this as well, it's not just us. And the edge innovation program allows companies to come to us to say, Help, I want to make this use case work. Or, hey, I can deliver an element of a use case, but I'm looking for how I can help prove it end to end. So we work with both sides. It's a platform strategy. We work with both sides to help create those use cases that can be demonstrated end to end. And if you look at our Mobile World Congress announcement of the audio where we showed simultaneously lossless low latency audio being being done illustrated by musicians in the US and Toronto and Europe simultaneously and synchronize here or here is an example of something that just was not possible to do four or five years ago without it.

Jo Peterson: 5:53

And that's great because you what you've created as an innovation system. There's a school of thought the global enterprise spending on Mac will mirror 5g spending, and will be driven by investments in on premises machine learning and low latency connectivity. Do you agree with that thinking?

Joanna Newman: 6:11

Almost. So absolutely. I think that global enterprise spending on edge as opposed to consumer spending on edge, think global enterprise spending on an edge, the most logical place and immediately practical for enterprises to use, this is on prem edge computing, they can use a distributed edge computing, which covers a satellite footprint, as opposed to a geographically bound office building a manufacturing site for satellite offices, etc. And there's quite a bit from those use cases. And also anything that moves as well as using that distributed architecture. We're under that satellite based footprint for edge computing. But the majority of the use cases sit in an enterprise supported by on premise edge computing. And that is supported by AI. Absolutely. Not necessarily solely machine learning, but AI itself. Now, AI is always supported by some machine learning somewhere. But whether that machine learning has to be sitting at that enterprise facility or can be sitting somewhere else, whether that has to be ml that's done on an edge computing capability, or is done in a different way. I think that's the bit that I was slightly, that is not as clear to me as perhaps the question lays out, but definitely with artificial intelligence to help just improve the game.

Jo Peterson: 7:32

It all feels like it's moving pretty quickly, what the end sausage looks like. We're not going to know for a bit I don't think right? You sort of talked about this earlier. But I want to dig in in a different way. So mobile edge computing is complex. And it's not just one thing, right? It's really this combination. You alluded to ecosystem earlier, but even the platforms themselves are combinations of hardware and software. Can you take a minute and talk to the audience in case they don't know about the components that make up a mobile edge computing solution and how they fit together?

Joanna Newman: 8:16

Now? And that's a great question. So So from two dimensions, edge computing is about bringing the processing capability closer to the customer closer to where it's needed, and abstracting it out of the center of the internet, which can take you know, in some cases, at 100 200 milliseconds to get to and bring it really closer to you. So you get a more responsive system. And from a low latency perspective, to provide that, obviously, you are providing computer computes its own hardware, but that hardware also needs software to be able to support those compute capabilities that typically run in a cloud scenario. So whether it's a public cloud scenario like that, we all know, so AWS, or answered or, or, or even the Google Cloud, or it's a it's a it's a private cloud, like Red Hat, like OpenShift, or, or IBM, for example, or anything could be a local cloud that you're supporting using some of those capabilities as well. The fact is that the computing sits close to the customer. And that's the perspective from which edge computing really sets. The other thing to call out is that edge computing, computing can sit in different places. So I you know, my phrase is, is that there are six that I know of, and I'm always competent, that a sevens being invented at some point. So you've got you've got edge computing on the far edge typically sits in remote locations that are very data intensive, does its computing there, and then farms up its outcome. And if semi regular periodic component, you've got on prem edge computing that I've talked about a few times is sitting in that manufacturing facility, sitting in that industrial site, for example, with blanketed with, with connectivity provided by a private network of one form or another that can sit right there. There's also edge computing that's integrated into the mobile network that allows me to support regardless of where you physically happen to be. If you're under one of the cell towers within the footprint, you'll receive that low latency when using that application if it's sited in the right location. So I think that, that when we talk about edge computing being complex, it's both from where that edge computing actually sits across, across that paradigm from far edge all the way to the network edge, but also what it's made up of and essentially, it's about bringing that compute closer to the Customer and the use case that needs it. Thanks.

Jo Peterson: 10:43

That makes a lot of sense. And thank you for laying it out that way. So in tech, we live for new terminology we do. I think it's something you know, we're all waiting for a new shortening of some, some technology to drop into a couple of letters. Right. And I, you know, to get ready for this, I was learning about Mac architecture. And from your background, I know, you know the answer to this question. So help me out here. We've got a host, a platform, a manager, and an orchestrator. What are those?

Joanna Newman: 11:16

And again, that's a great question as well. And it's important to note that not all are present in each type of iteration of edge as well, irrespective of where that edge happens to sit. But in broad brushstrokes, you have your computer that hosts the workload, and that workload is powered. Obviously, that workload is powered by some sort of hardware that has a host operating that hardware, ensuring that resources are available to that workload to be used at that time, there could be a Platform Manager or hypervisor that allows multiple workloads to operate sharing those resources, you know, in the traditional NIST cloud principles there. And in some cases, there is a, there's a use case for an orchestrator to be involved, and that that will really come into play in the next release of three GPP. And also those mobile use cases, because those workloads may need to be orchestrated across multiple edge compute locations as well. So if you think about a car driving, and there's a, there's a trial with continental the car manufacturing company, on a test track in Germany, using public spectrum, where the German government are exploring the safety features of having edge workloads sitting on the car, and what happens if, if it transitions from one, one cell site to another, and maybe one has a stronger signal, can you orchestrate the data associated with that workload seamlessly along there for a safety critical scenario. So this is one of the things that we're orchestration will really come into play as well.

Jo Peterson: 12:56

I can see that. And I can see, you know, that that makes things really real. You don't want to be driving and have a situation with your car, right? All of a sudden, you just don't have the ability to communicate, for example, right? Because it's not, it's not working. So yeah, that things just get real, you know, they come out of the lab, and then all of a sudden, they're part of our daily lives.

Joanna Newman: 13:23

Just to elaborate a little more on the car scenario, it's not necessarily focused on how the car operates itself. I mean, obviously, that self driving car initiative, and the Jetsons, etc, is something that people want to do. And there is some progress being made toward that. But what this trial is is about is about safety, critical information to prevent cars from interacting with each other in an unplanned way. So it's not about the car itself, not operating when you're sitting in it. It's about ensuring that they're safe stopping distance between cars, that you can receive traffic alerts, if there's an accident ahead, etc. So it's, it's that perspective on safety, as opposed to from the driver out, it's far from the external environment in

Jo Peterson: 14:07

I love the notifications and I just got a new car. And I've got to figure out how to turn the lady off the talks to me because she's telling me about winter storm warnings that are 24.1 miles away, as I'm driving in Southern California. So, you know, maybe maybe I'm over I got a little bit too much technology going on in my new car. I don't know. So let's talk about something super fun. The metaverse. Now, some would say the metaverse has emerged as the next generation of the internet. Has you put on your thinking cap and look into your crystal ball? Because I know that you've got both of those things right. Talk to us about a mech enabled Metaverse and what that might look like in the next couple of years. How cool.

Joanna Newman: 14:55

Yes, I think the metaverse is really exciting. And also the open verse as well, which is which is when when the metaverse expands across to cover all sorts of interactions and not just sitting on a beach somewhere or, or doing whatever whatever needs to be done. And, you know, Vodafone was really proud to demonstrate a quality on demand API at Mobile World Congress that can be used for video stream or it's can be used for video conferencing along with Telefonica and orange and we've been working on that for quite a while. It's an enormous achievement to be able to synchronize across different networks to ensure that calls like this one can be done in a more low latency way. So I'm not sure quite about the time Over the next couple of years, but I think you'll see a lot of new Metaverse use cases. And lots of Metaverse experiences coming out that that will take advantage of the low latency or in some cases ultra low latency capabilities that an Edge provides. I think we're a little ways away from having blanket capability across a massive geography like North America or Western Europe. But those certainly see some opportunities in location specific scenarios. So one of the ones that I was speaking to somebody about last week involve conferences so tech conferences have talked about Mobile World Congress a couple of times. But a tech conferences happen all the time. You know, you've got CES and in Vegas as well. And would it make sense to do something that seats the metaverse for an element of that so maybe one of the one of the holes is Metaverse enabled, etc, etc, from a little late, and then all of a sudden, you've got your compute close to be able to deliver that. And you can sandwich that together. Whether that will actually happen within a couple of years or not, remains to be seen. But that's just an example as to how the metaverse and the edge use cases can really can really come to life together in a more serious way. The open verse in the metaverse will require a lower and lower latency capability associated with them to be able to really thrive. And of course, edge computing sits on that. The question is, where's the money to pay for it? And I'm not sure that anybody's answered that question yet for how that'll be delivered. Yeah,

Jo Peterson: 17:10

it's got to be commercially viable. Right. And so you make some really good points there. It'll be exciting to see how it unfolds. Yeah, it'll be fun. So we always wrap up the podcast, with asking you a fun fact. So what fun fact can you share with us today, Joanna?

Joanna Newman: 17:29

So my fun fact is, and I've actually been there that there used to be two countries in the island of Australia. The story is that that hot river province that's HUD with two T's so you can go and find it on on Wikipedia, that HUD river province, they had a problem with the price set by the grain board of Australia, they were obviously servants of the Queen, you cannot be a servant of the Queen and sue the queen. And the dairy the Wheat Board was was sponsored by the Queen as well as happens in Commonwealth countries. And therefore they needed to separate to be able to raise legal challenge. And a lot of people took a lot of substances to work out how to do that. And they did. So they created their own country. They were members of the UN they issued their own passports, etc. So two countries on the island of Australia is what there used to be. I think a rubber province is now deprecated itself as it got into the situation of needing to support with pensions and old age and security, etc. But yes, that's my fun fact.

Jo Peterson: 18:35

That's cool. Geography fact from a lady that's traveled the globe. So that's pretty cool. Well, thank you so much for taking time to visit with us today. We appreciate your insights. And come back and see us again.

Joanna Newman: 18:50

Thank you so much, Jo. It's been a wonderful conversation and I look forward to hearing more about how all these topics progressed over the coming years.