Today, organizations must send much of the machine-generated data they collect at the edge of the network to a central backend environment for processing. But the situation is changing rapidly thanks to the efforts of vendors like Hewlett Packard Enterprise. At its Discover summit this week, the company introduced a pair of converged appliances that provide the ability to perform such analysis directly on-site.

The first is called the Edgeline EL1000 and combines a ProLiant Moonlight server cartridge with two storage drives of the customer’s choice in a non-standard chassis that weighs less than 12 pounds. Its bigger sibling, the EL4000, is somewhat bulkier but in return provides the ability to pack four nodes inside the case with 64 processors between them. HPE veep Tom Bradicich noted in an interview that the machine handily outperforms the edge routers and other small devices most commonly seen at remote locations, a not-so-subtle jab at his firm’s competitors.

Earlier this month, IBM Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc. announced a collaboration to make the analytics capabilities of Watson available on the latter’s networking gear. From a high-level view, their value proposition is practically identical to HPE’s. The vendors say that removing the need to process machine-generated in a remote location eliminates the delay associated with moving data back and forth across the network, which speeds up response times considerably. And it also cuts bandwidth expenses in the process, a major boon for large organizations with a lot of information to ingest.

But perhaps most importantly, enabling field staff to perform analysis locally removes the reliance on steady Internet connectivity, a major benefit in remote locations where network access is often sporadic. On oil rig, for instance, outages can last for days during bad weather. Such environments represent a major revenue opportunity for vendors like HPE that is poised to attract a great deal of competition in the coming years.

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