The intelligent edge is a rich source of differentiation, user experience, and data to power business growth, but the sheer size and complexity of edge initiatives can be intimidating. HPE’s proven, scalable approach maximizes the benefits of even the largest deployment.
By Norbert Reil, Senior Director and Global Practice Head, HPE Advisory & Professional Services for Network Solutions; and
Francesco Cadisco, HPE GreenLake Global Product Manager for Networking and IoT Advisory & Professional Services
The words themselves don’t provide any hints as to where much of the data for transformation is coming from. It’s not in the cloud or in the data center. It’s at the edge. Organizations are pressing hard to unlock the intelligence generated within objects, sensors, systems, and devices and apply it to more and more processes, use cases, products, and services. But even more, the goal is to maximize security, employee performance, user experience, and autonomy at the edge. It’s happening every day, across a vast range of industries. And it’s accelerating.
Why? For two major reasons, as we see it. First, the cost of the components for intelligent systems has historically trended rapidly downward. It’s worth remembering that some of the earliest Internet of Things projects were around monitoring and maintenance of aircraft engines and were hugely expensive. Nowadays, with the technologies so much more affordable, IoT projects might make sense for equipment as small as coffee vending machines. And it’s not just offices and machinery, of course. It’s remote devices, point-of-sale systems, video captures … the list is endless.
Second, companies have a much better understanding of how data can drive innovation in products and processes. Businesses don't want to be simply leaders on pricing. They want to be innovation leaders and deliver new customer and user experiences. And that means looking for insights at the edge, where customer and user data is generated, with the help of AI and ML technologies.
The Edge is a big place
The opportunities are huge, but the challenges can be significant, too. Edge deployments are intrinsically complex and often vast in scope. The complexities arise from the fact that we’re dealing with distributed infrastructure, outside the controlled environment of the data center. These deployments may involve from 100 to tens of thousands of sites where IT infrastructure or intelligent components need to be deployed in a carefully coordinated and integrated way without disruption – usually into a live environment.
Consider the retail sector, where a brand might need to transform its edge infrastructure across hundreds of stores in order to improve the customer experience, make store operations smarter, and increase sales. Or the Telco sector, where providers are currently pushing hard to spread 5G functions to the far edge close to the radio access network layers, a move that involves infrastructure upgrades at tens of thousands of towers.
It’s the same story for intelligent offices, manufacturing site IT modernizations, and in many other industries where companies face up against the sheer size of the edge. Last but not least, businesses are facing an IT security shift from “protect the perimeter” to zero-trust-based communication between all stakeholders located anywhere. Such transformations also require massive edge deployments of secure connectivity solutions like SD-WAN (Software Defined Wide Area Network) or SASE (Secure Access Service Edge).
It's not like when you’re dealing with a single cloud or a single data center, and you have a team of people on-site to get the job done and intervene if things go wrong. Edge deployments are a different beast. You’re talking hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, sometimes even hundreds of thousands of locations where you want to establish trusted connectivity, deploy local applications, and manage and fix local issues in a centrally controlled fashion.
A proven, efficient, scalable approach
To help companies capitalize on the opportunities while restricting the risks, HPE offers HPE Industrialized Edge Deployment services. These services are specifically designed to accelerate large-scale edge projects while improving their efficiency and quality and mitigating the risks. In a nutshell, we apply a proven, comprehensive methodology that delivers a replicable framework for the rollout of edge networks and services, encompassing every step of the edge transformation journey – from planning, to design, to pilot, to large-scale deployment and the transition to operations.
A quick word about the name Industrialized Edge Deployment services … we chose the “industrialized” part carefully, in order to reflect the benefits of the offering. It doesn’t imply that we’re focusing mainly on manufacturing – that’s an important sector for edge initiatives, of course, but it’s just one of the many industries that can benefit from these services. We chose the name to communicate the foundations of our approach:
- Standardized: A consistent methodology ensures your edge projects are highly efficient, high-quality, and cost effective. They’re asset-driven so you you’re not reinventing the wheel for each location.
- Mature: HPE has a long history of helping companies with their edge initiatives, and we understand the potential pitfalls as well as the fastest routes to success.
- Scalable: We can work with you to apply the methodology for 10 sites, and it will deliver excellent results. But we can also expand it to 100,000 sites with the same level of success, optimizing the time and effort required. That means you can hugely accelerate your rollout in terms of the number of locations by operating in a parallel process mode.
HPE Industrialized Edge Deployment services help you in the journey to elevate the maturity of your edge-to-cloud environment:
Modernize your networks. Improving and securing edge connectivity is the first necessary step to enable any transformation as required to support your evolving business requirements, such as process optimization, merger and acquisitions activity, and geographic growth. Lack of focus on network modernization can compromise the overall effectiveness of a solution. Thanks to our decades of experience with Networking, HPE is the right partner to guide you through a safe network modernization path, based on our own technologies and multivendor solution aggregation capabilities.
Harness your data at the edge. With HPE solutions and tightly integrated solutions from our extensive partner ecosystem, we can address the vast majority of digitalization use cases, including artificial intelligence, smart manufacturing, Smart City initiatives, and edge-connected products and services.
Leverage edge solutions as-a-service. Enterprises are looking to position themselves as pay-per-use services providers to their customers. This means finding ways to meet customers’ needs in a model that can provide big advantages for both parties – the as-a-service model. We’re all familiar with examples of this kind of move: “We don’t sell air compressors anymore – we sell compressed air services.”
At the same time, the transition to a consumption-based approach can help you to optimize your infrastructure investments. HPE is ideally positioned to fill these needs with the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform. With HPE GreenLake cloud services, you can bypass the need for large upfront investments with a pay-per-use model and easily align capacity and deployments to demand.
The image below gives a quick overview of HPE Industrialized Edge Deployment services.
How we work with you
We won’t go into the details of our services and deliverables here; instead, we’ll describe what we see as the broad phases of a typical engagement.
It all starts with the advisory phase, in which we cover all of the variants for the different deployment targets. Edge deployments are not one-size-fits-all. There are different types of retail point-of-sales systems, different levels of intelligence in telco antennas. The over-riding objective is replicability, certainly. But to get there, we need to develop a deep understanding of your specific situation – your constraints and objectives. This is a key success factor; it enables us to tailor our already well-structured methodology to your unique needs, and it sets the direction for the entire initiative.
From there, we move to the solution aggregation phase. This is where we bring together the HPE solutions and third-party components, software and hardware, to build the pilot and create the best end-to-end solution to deliver your outcomes. Here we can call on proven processes that HPE uses day-in, day-out to accelerate and test solutions. For example, HPE Factory Express Integration services can ensure that HPE equipment is preconfigured and tested before it leaves our factory, to reduce installation time.
Now we’re ready for the large scale deployment phase, and it’s time to manage logistics, to start shipping and staging equipment at your various sites. Efficiency plays a huge role here. Is it a local delivery? Is it a global shipment? It all needs to be figured out. HPE has done it for many customers and for a long time, so we know what’s involved to ensure that the right teams are on site, ready to implement the solution in an efficient, consistent, and controlled fashion. And because of HPE’s global reach, this can be anywhere from Chicago to Johannesburg, from China to the Middle East. Such rollouts are always based on our proven processes and tools, which incorporate the flexibility to cover the customer and solution specifics of the deployment.
Once the solution is in place, tested and verified, we’re ready for the transition to customer operations. We ensure that all the right documentation is completed for a successful handover. Some customers choose to operate the solution themselves; others already have an outsourced operation in place. You may want to consider HPE GreenLake Management Services, a managed services solution that remotely monitors and operates your infrastructure and applications, proactively detects and resolves issues, and helps you optimize your environments.
And here’s another important and exciting point about how we work with you. HPE Industrialized Edge Deployment services are a standalone offering, but they are part of a complete portfolio of HPE services for multi-vendor edge transformation. So if you’re looking for guidance in shaping your broad digital agenda for the edge, HPE Advisory & Professional services can help you with that. If you want to integrate your edge value proposition into your enterprise solutions – from workplace to hybrid cloud to data analytics and more – we have a full set of end-to-end capabilities to enable that, too.
Four breakthrough benefits
So what are the benefits that a customer can expect to see from an edge initiative guided by HPE Industrialized Edge Deployment services? There are many, but we’d point to these four:
- Enhanced quality control, efficiency and manageability for your deployment. HPE Industrialized Edge Deployment services deliver the right mix of centralized and distributed capabilities to drive your project’s success. This is often a difficult balance to achieve for companies that are relying solely on internal resources.
- Central technical governance that we bring to the entire process through a core team of highly skilled, very experienced people. Our global deployment teams handle the on-site tasks, and our network of partners amplifies our capabilities and helps scale up the deployment as needed. It all adds up to a smoother, easier, more effective initiative – and those are crucial qualities when you’re dealing potentially with tens of thousands of data sources.
- Modern, secure connectivity. Our edge-to-cloud architectures deliver next-generation levels of network performance, flexibility and resilience. Cybersecurity is, of course, a key aspect of this, and it’s embedded throughout our methodology and within HPE infrastructure.
Secure connectivity is crucial if you want to do things like moving edge data to a central analytics capability to develop insights on, say, customer behavior or pricing strategies. As we often say, security and connectivity are the two sides of the same coin. - A fast on-ramp to innovation. With edge data flowing to where it creates the most value, you can quickly power up your use cases, whatever those may be. A smart in-store shopping experience where customers can automatically get the information they need on their cell phones? An AI project to redesign a product portfolio in line with new customer needs and perceptions? The possibilities are as wide as the Edge itself.
Customers’ competitive benefits
By leveraging intelligence at the edge, you can be a first mover – an innovation leader. You can build a sustainable competitive advantage for your core products and services offerings. “Time to market” is what we’re really talking about here. And yes, that might be, just like “digitalization,” a somewhat overworked concept – but it’s one that’s hugely meaningful and that describes a critical dimension of competitiveness in today’s business environments.
In a nutshell
After large gains in IT flexibility, simplicity, and cost from implementing cloud strategies over the last decade, now it’s time to leverage these capabilities by harvesting valuable data from the edge and by making edge locations, products, and devices more intelligent and autonomous. The six key learnings on how to accomplish that are:
1. Companies’ next focus on innovation is to gain competitive advantage through digitalization at the edge.
2. The business case for edge transformations should be validated in an Advisory Phase, but is very promising for the majority of use cases.
3. Typical targets are:
- office/campus spaces
- manufacturing sites
- point of sales/shops
- telco radio towers
- general IT security deployments to replace outdated “perimeter protection” architectures.
4. However, through their distributed and heterogenous nature, such deployments are complicated and time-consuming.
5. HPE has established a specific methodology, a dedicated team, and a service offering second to none for executing edge IT deployments.
6. We industrialized this capability to ensure consistent deployment quality, lowest cost based on an asset-driven approach, and high scalability from 100 to tens of thousands of edge locations.
Read more about HPE Industrialized Edge Deployment services for large-scale edge deployments.
Learn more about HPE Advisory & Professional services.
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