The EdgeX Foundry community is comprised of a diverse set of member companies that represent the IoT ecosystem. The Member Spotlight blog series highlights these members and how they are contributing to and leveraging open source solutions. Today, we sat down with Joel Vincent, the Chief Marketing Officer for ZEDEDA, to discuss the power of IoT, edge computing, the reason they recently joined EdgeX Foundry and preview the new demo they are debuting at IoT Solutions World Congress in a few weeks.

What does your company do?

Quite simply, ZEDEDA is building an applications services platform for the cloud-native edge. Our vision is to free cloud apps and allow any app to run anywhere on any device. As edge computing expands beyond the constraints of embedded computing, ZEDEDA effectively completes the cloud.

Why is your company investing in the IoT ecosystem?

IoT and the world of Edge Computing is not just expected to be orders of magnitude larger than the cloud itself, it’s going to be a world of inter-networked, multi-vendor, multi-owner, hardware diversity. We haven’t seen anything like this since the advent of TCP/IP itself. How do you get this diverse universe of computing working together to allow businesses to use the edge to evolve?  It’s going to require multi-vendor cooperation, open source efforts, and universal standards built around an IoT ecosystem.

How has IoT impacted your company? What benefits have you seen or what do you expect to achieve?

The forces that made the Internet of Things possible gave rise to the fundamental technologies that made ZEDEDA possible. Compute power continues to shrink in size and cost and increase in capabilities. It was only a matter of time before compute power that was once considered server-class was small enough, powerful enough, and cheap enough to be embedded in everyday devices that even a consumer can afford. That meant a new compute orchestration layer was required. That’s where we came in. In fact, we couldn’t have created ZEDEDA 3 or 4 years ago. Computing technology and IoT have advanced that quickly.

Why did your company join EdgeX Foundry?

EdgeX Foundry represents an opportunity to collaborate with other thought leading companies in edge computing and really make an open edge framework a reality. With a vision of apps running anywhere, on any device, over any network the goals of EdgeX Foundry aligned perfectly with our vision and mission for the future of computing.

How are you going to use the framework?

For us and the orchestration of the edge virtualization requires apps to view, understand, and address hardware in a standard fashion. Initially on of the most difficult things to orchestrate is how an app accesses the hardware resources its running on and with the diversity of hardware a framework defining how resources are handled and abstracting the “sausage making” away from the app development so that any app can address any hardware resource is a major key.

So our first effort, which we are demonstrating at IoT Solutions World Congress 2018 is how to get the EdgeX microservices deployed on thousands of devices that are geographically distributed in a simple, repeatable, and secure fashion. Once enabled, an app build to the EdgeX framework will be able to “work” on the hardware we’ve enabled.

Where do you see enterprise and industrial IoT in 20 years?

You won’t see it. It will just be. Everything will be connected, the cloud will be ubiquitous (seamless between the cloud we know today and the edge that is being built in a standard fashion tomorrow), and from this how we experience the world will be completely different. You will EXPERIENCE IoT in everything you do, but you won’t see a damn thing!