Welcome to the intelligent edge. Deloitte describes it as ‘the ability to pull upon the capabilities of Industry 4.0 technologies to act on the intelligence offered by data close to where it is captured’. It is the empowerment of the enterprise through efficiencies and valuable insights and the rich mysteries of analytics to translate data into insights and transformative business processes. Here, at the edge, the full scope of AI, connectivity, and compute merge to provide the organisation with the tools it needs to improve operations and drive the competitive advantage.

Forrester believes that the intelligent edge has come of age, moving from the realm of a science experiment to a solution capable of delivering real value. It is, according to the research firm, not so much a promising technology, but a toolkit that can be leveraged to transform cloud capability and enterprise innovation and that is able to fully realise the potential of the data generated by the Internet of Things, AI and 5G.