Keynote: New Research on Embryonic Edge: Apps, Money, Momentum - Michael Howard, Senior Research Director, Carrier Networks, IHS/Infonetics Research The industry is excited about opportunities for the network Edge—or more exact, the Edges. IHS Markit just completed interviewing a group of the industry’s top edge experts from operators, vendors, startups, and industry organizations. We define edge applications as those that run on edge compute located within 20 milliseconds of the end user, device or machine. We found the top 10 edge applications, the expected top revenue producers, and when each app will be deployed. Of course, the edge is not free and is not without problems to be solved—so we found which apps are most expensive to deploy and what are the problems the industry has yet in front of us to solve before the edge is fully upon us. About Michael Howard Michael Howard co-founded market research firm Infonetics Research in 1990, and today is recognized worldwide as one of the industry’s leading experts in emerging markets, network operator trends, and user buying patterns. Infonetics was acquired by IHS Markit in 2014. Nicknamed the “Ethernet pope,” Michael leverages 40 years of communications industry experience to author research on carrier Ethernet, cloud access, software-defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV), carrier routers and switches, mobile backhaul, OpenFlow, and packet-optical transport. Before founding Infonetics, Michael was an IT Director at Tymshare/Tymnet, where he created network accounting and led the First Interstate Bank project that developed the world's first pre-Internet in-home banking system. Prior to that, shortly after majoring in Mathematics at University of California Berkeley, Michael worked for Systems Development Corporation on operating systems and programming language compilers for ARPAnet, which later became the Internet
