In between meeting with customers, crowdchatting with our communities and hosting theCUBE, the research team at Wikibon, owned by the same company as SiliconANGLE, finds time to meet and discuss trends and topics regarding digital business transformation and technology markets. We look at things from the standpoints of business, the Internet of Things, big data, application, cloud and infrastructure modernization. We use the results of our research meetings to explore new research topics, further current research projects and share insights. This is the third summary of findings from these regular meetings, which we plan to publish every week.

Six years ago, a prominent venture capitalist argued that software is eating the world. That general concept, while very powerful, takes on specific meaning in the context of edge computing, which is where the interface between digital systems and the real world is most pronounced. Indeed, if software’s going to eat the world, we must especially understand how software’s going to eat the edge.

The edge is the most complex and demanding environment that we have ever tried to build software for. It features high-value and often dangerous human and machine interactions that are real-world, real-time and, often enough, really risky. Many of the approaches and business models that helped software “eat” more stylized domains, such as finance, human resources and customer relationship management, aren’t appropriate for edge systems.

Creating software that can eat the edge will require five significant adjustments to how we think about software and software businesses:

1. Data first. The new world is one that’s driven by data-rich models and the effort to introduce machine learning, AI and similar types of technologies that can reflect and represent real-world behavior to digital systems.

2. Help desperately wanted. The building of those models employs new disciplines, such as data science, that are not generally incorporated into how we think about building software – and certainly not in the tool sets that we use to build software.

3. Who owns what? The intellectual property requirements for being able to bring together models from multiple parties, including vendors as well as users, are not well-defined in terms of protecting that intellectual property and governing how they’ll work together.

4. The robot did it! The whole concept of liability, culpability and responsibility for how these systems will work in the real world is going to require a lot of regulation, government intervention and ultimately case law to work out.

5. Still need the hard stuff. Software at scale almost always turns into hardware. The performance requirements of the edge ensure that low-cost computers, field-programmable gate arrays and similar technologies, and other types of specialized hardware are a crucial feature of metabolic pathways for digital business. The technology industry has good ideas how much of this technology will be built, but not how it will be commercialized and supported.

Wikibon believes there will be significant investment made in understanding the conventions that we use to design these systems, the tooling that we use to build these systems and then the human and social structures that we employ to institutionalize the work that this will ultimately entail. More so than any other issue, how software eats the edge will shape the future of information technology and business.

Action item: The edge is relevant to all businesses and will have profound implications on IT futures. Chief information officers must begin building edge concepts into architecture strategies, but also prepare their businesses for different design, development and procurement practices.

Image: Pixabay