The 25 Hottest IT Infrastructure And Cloud Companies: 2020 Edge Computing 100
As part of CRN’s Edge Computing 100 list, these 25 vendors provide the backbone of infrastructure and cloud technologies for the intelligent edge.
Extending To The Edge
While intelligent edge may be the next major frontier in IT, there are plenty of familiar players driving the innovation needed to make the edge revolution a reality.
As part of our Edge Computing 100 list of the most important edge vendors for channel partners to know about, we’ve selected 25 vendors that are providing the backbone of infrastructure and cloud technologies that the intelligent edge requires. Many of them are veterans of data center infrastructure or public cloud, and are now adapting and extending their technologies to enable high-performance edge computing environments.
The companies include makers of IT infrastructure spanning networking, storage, computing devices, power management and processors, as well as the top public cloud platforms. Along with industry stalwarts, this list also covers a few newer players, such as Pensando and EdgeConneX.
What follows are 25 edge computing companies to know about from the infrastructure and cloud sectors.
Amazon Web Services
Seattle
Top Executive: Andy Jassy, CEO
AWS is leaving no stone unturned in its battle for edge computing supremacy. The company’s AWS Workspaces desktop as a service offering is gaining momentum in the channel. SychroNet, one of AWS’ top WorkSpaces partners, has helped its customers enable more than 75,000 users to work from home during the pandemic. Besides that, AWS this year implemented its AWS WaveLength 5G Edge computing platform with Verizon. WaveLength, with initial implementations in Boston and the San Francisco, is designed to enable a new era of edge applications for emerging markets like smart factories, smart cities and autonomous vehicles.
AMD
Santa Clara, Calif.
Top Executive: Lisa Su, President, CEO
AMD is bringing the performance and efficiency gains of its PC and server processors to the edge computing market. The company’s latest offerings include its newly launched Ryzen Embedded V2000 Series, which combines its Zen 2 architecture and Radeon graphics to deliver high-performance compute and display capabilities plus enterprise-class security features.
APC by Schneider Electric
West Kingston, R.I.
Top Executive: Jean-Pascal Tricoire, Chairman, CEO
APC by Schneider Electric has been doubling down on edge infrastructure and management software, including its NetBotz Monitoring and Management System that provides unprecedented visibility at edge locations. Its new EcoStruxure Micro Data Center C-Series 6U wall mount brings together power, cooling, racks and management.
Aruba, an HPE Company
Santa Clara, Calif.
Top Executive: Keerti Melkote, Founder, President
Aruba Networks has released several products aimed at helping businesses connect devices, protect their endpoints, analyze the data gathered and then act on that data. These include its Wi-Fi 6-capable access points for connection, Aruba ClearPass for protection, and the brand-new Aruba Edge Services Platform (ESP).
Cambium Networks
Rolling Meadows, Ill.
Top Executive: Atul Bhatnagar, President, CEO
Cambium Networks, which went public last year, has been focused on launching new wireless products and has its eye on 5G. In the meantime, the company continues to double down on developing Wireless Fabric Intelligent Edge offerings to enable network operators to connect people, places and things.
Cisco
San Jose, Calif.
Top Executive: Chuck Robbins, Chairman, CEO
Networking behemoth Cisco knows that boundless opportunities await partners at the edge. That‘s why the company is infusing its product lines, especially its flagship Catalyst suite, with edge application support to target new IT requirements, evolving SD-WAN needs and multi-cloud architectures.
Dell Technologies
Round Rock, Texas
Top Executive: Michael Dell, Founder, Chairman, CEO
Dell is a leader in edge computing hardware and software by providing servers, storage and hyperconverged infrastructure offerings at the edge, including its new VxRail ruggedized D-Series. Dell also offers a slew of purpose-built edge gateways for the Internet of Things.
Eaton
Dublin, Ireland
Top Executive: Craig Arnold, Chairman, CEO
The rise of edge computing is bringing with it a resurgence in the hardware market, and Eaton stands ready to protect that hardware with its lineup of power offerings. Eaton has invested heavily to incorporate remote management features into its portfolio, a key factor in enabling the channel with no-touch service capabilities.
EdgeConnex
Herndon, Va.
Top Executive: Randy Brouckman, Co-Founder, CEO
EdgeConneX specializes in building and operating purpose-built data centers at the edge with more than 40 data centers across the globe. The company’s EdgeConneX multi-access edge computing infrastructure is used to test 5G networks and power virtual reality platforms, while its EdgeOS is a purpose-built operating system for edge environments.
Equinix
Redwood City, Calif.
Top Executive: Charles Meyers, President, CEO
The data center behemoth is doubling down on edge innovation with launches like its Network Edge, which provides virtual networking and security edge services. In March, Equinix acquired bare-metal automation startup Packet to create new offerings that will allow customers to rapidly deploy digital infrastructure at the edge.
Extreme Networks
San Jose, Calif.
Top Executive: Ed Meyercord, President, CEO
Networking leader Extreme Networks isn‘t being shy about its edge strategy. The company has become very competitive in more places in the network, from all the way out to the edge on the wireless network, to its Edge Switching platform, and then connecting back to the core of the network.
Google Cloud
Mountain View, Calif.
Top Executive: Thomas Kurian, CEO
Google Cloud late this year stepped up its edge computing charge with a plan to deliver more than 200 partner applications at the edge, from 30-plus launch partners, on Google Cloud. “By partnering with these Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), we’re enabling the rapid delivery and deployment of new vertical services and applications, leveraging Google Cloud core components, including Anthos, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML), as well as Google’s global edge network and our telecom partners’ networks,” said Amol Phadke, managing director for Telecom Industry Solutions at Google Cloud in a blog post.
Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian, meanwhile, recently said that the cloud powerhouse is working with NetApp to provide expanded solutions around virtual desktops.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
San Jose, Calif.
Top Executive: Antonio Neri, President, CEO
Give Neri credit for realizing long before others that there was a big opportunity at the edge. He has made the intelligent edge a reality for customers and partners with an arsenal of HPE products that are delivering game-changing business outcomes for customers and big profits for partners.
Hitachi Vantara
Santa Clara, Calif.
Top Executive: Gajen Kandiah, CEO
Hitachi Vantara helps organizations gain real-time insight from systems at the edge with Lumada Edge Intelligence, which is complemented by purpose-built IoT solutions such as Lumada Maintenance Insights. The company’s edge platform lets organizations run AI and machine-learning applications at the edge while streamlining data integration, configuration and management.
HP
Palo Alto, Calif.
Top Executive: Enrique Lores, President, CEO
While mostly known as a leading maker of PCs and printers, HP Inc. branched out into the edge market in 2020 with the debut of software that makes the ingestion of data for on-site processing into an easier undertaking. The product, HP Engage Edge, is powered by the open-source EdgeX Foundry platform and targeted for use on HP point-of-sale hardware in retail and hospitality environments. Key to the offering is its open framework—which is both sensor-agnostic and cloud-agnostic—eliminating the need for ISVs to perform tedious hardware-software integrations.
IBM
Armonk, N.Y.
Top Executive: Arvind Krishna, CEO
There’s a reason some of the biggest companies in the world are teaming with IBM on breakthrough 5G and edge applications: the company’s proven multi-cloud innovation track record and AI capabilities. Among the companies that have teamed with IBM on 5G and edge computing innovation is telecom behemoths Verizon and Vodafone.
IBM President Jim Whitehurst told CRN earlier this year at a BoB Conference keynote session that the edge explosion opens up “tremendous” opportunities for IBM partners. “The possibilities are almost limitless when you start saying, I’m taking away the constraint that this thing runs in a datacenter and all of a sudden from sensor data all the way out to the edge you can start thinking about where and how you want to add value through all of that.”
Intel
Santa Clara, Calif.
Top Executive: Bob Swan, CEO
Intel provides a mix of silicon and software offerings to help organizations solve edge computing challenges. This includes the company’s new Intel Atom e6000E processors, which support real-time computing applications, and its OpenVINO software toolkits, which optimizes AI performance at the edge on a variety of Intel silicon.
Juniper Networks
Sunnyvale, Calif.
Top Executive: Rami Rahim, CEO
Because of its history with service providers, the edge isn‘t new to Juniper Networks. The networking giant today comes to market with its flagship WAN edge offering, made up of its SRX Series Services Gateways—physical, virtual and cloud—and Contrail Service Orchestration. The company is working to integrate its Mist Marvis AI/ML engine into its entire portfolio.
Lenovo
Morrisville, N.C.
Top Executive: Yang Yuanqing, Chairman, CEO
Lenovo provides a slew of products for edge locations, from laptops to ruggedized servers for remote locations with a “fit anywhere” form factor. The company’s wireless connectivity, tamper-proof security, built-in AI and zero-touch provisioning create an easily managed edge location. The company calls its ThinkSystem SE350 server the “workhorse” for edge computing.
Microsoft
Redmond, Wash.
Top Executive: Satya Nadella, CEO
Microsoft has doubled down on its intelligent edge focus over the past year with the debut of offerings including Azure Edge Zones for 5G, which reduces latency in 5G networks to lessen the impact on edge deployments. The company also expanded its Azure Stack Edge portfolio of edge computing devices and rolled out updates for Azure Arc—its software that enables the deployment of Azure services to any environment, including at the edge.
NetApp
Sunnyvale, Calif.
Top Executive: George Kurian, CEO
Storage vendor NetApp has technology that remotely or centrally stores data collected at the edge, and can process that data at scale using its NetApp StorageGrid object storage system with its intelligent policy engine that applies and enforces policies related to the data’s performance, durability, availability, geographic location, longevity and cost.
NVIDIA
Santa Clara, Calif.
Top Executive: Jensen Huang, Founder, President, CEO
Nvidia is tackling the edge computing market with a combination of silicon, software and systems expertise. The company’s edge strategy is encompassed in its EGX edge AI platform, a reference architecture and software stack that takes advantage of Nvidia’s full range of compute GPUs and GPU-accelerated software for edge applications.
Pensando
Milpitas, Calif.
Top Executive: Prem Jain, Co-Founder, CEO
Pensando’s mission is to bring the same hyperscaler innovation Amazon Web Services brought to the cloud to what Pensando calls the “new edge.” The company said its flagship software-defined edge services platform delivers 5X to 9X improvements in “productivity, performance and scale” when compared with AWS with no “risk of lock-in.”
Pure Storage
Mountain View, Calif.
Top Executive: Charles Giancarlo, Chairman, CEO
All-flash storage and cloud management technology developer Pure Storage’s Purity Operating Environment is scalable storage software for intelligently managing data across data centers, at the edge or in the cloud. It supports a variety of replication, snapshot and other technologies to automatically place workloads and data on the best infrastructure.
Vertiv
Columbus, Ohio
Rob Johnson, CEO
Vertiv’s extensive portfolio of tailor-made edge power, software and service offerings focus on enabling micro data centers in remote and small IT environments. In September, it launched a preintegrated micro data center rack that includes a PDU, monitoring sensors, software and a self-contained rack cooling system for easy edge deployment.