Depends on who you ask
SANTA CLARA, Calif.–“I think edge is to fog as to what apple is to fruit,” Helder Antunes, chairman of the OpenFog Consortium told RCR Wireless News during Fog World Congress.
He continued: “We look at fog computing as an end-to-end architecture from the cloud to the very thing connected. It encompasses bits and pieces from the cloud. Edge means different things to different people. Edge is of course a big part of it. When you talk about fog nodes and fog gateways, aggregating sensory devices at the edge, it is in essence an aspect of edge computing.”
Matthew Vasey, director of IoT business development for Microsoft, an OpenFog Consortium board member and OPC Foundation board member, said, “When I think about edge, you have edge devices, a bunch of transport, then a cloud. We think that there needs to be additional topologies that include gateways and compute that go deeper into the network.”
“I hate the term,” Rob Risany, EVP of IoT Strategy and Business Solutions for ADLink said. “It creates confusion about what’s really happening. The edge is where value is created or captured and that’s really important.”
He said terms “obfuscate what you’re trying to accomplish. Fog is nice and trendy. It works good on analyst reports. The reason I would hesitate to put any new term down is I actually don’t think it’s new. It’s like saying the internet of things is new. The term is new, but embedded and distributed computing has been going on in the military since since the 80s. When you throw a term like fog into it, what you’re basically saying is it’s a new term because it’s a new market for who’s trying to use it.”
