A complete mess, a disaster, a jigsaw puzzle. Such descriptors for the state of edge computing leave companies wondering: Who will ultimately solve this problem? Will it take of half of Silicon Valley to piece together a solution with many different products? Or will one intrepid company armed with a custom P4 processing engine develop a whole new model to tackle daunting edge use cases?

It could potentially be either. But an equally, or perhaps more, important question is: How long does the enterprise want to wait?

“Market transitions of this nature really require understanding the entire stack,” according to Francis Matus (pictured), vice president of engineering at Pensando Systems Inc. “If you provide a piece and someone else provides a piece, you will eventually get there. But it’s a matter of when.” 

Pensando is not your average startup. Founded in 2017 and emerging from stealth late last year, the company is headed by engineers with years of networking experience at legacy giant Cisco Systems Inc. It wants to be the company to crack edge computing with a comprehensive hardware-software solution with a focus on domain-specific processing.

Matus spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during Pensando’s Future Proof Your Enterprise event. They discussed Pensando’s full-stack approach to transforming edge computing. (* Disclosure below.)

Full-stack solution brings movable feast to data at the edge

Pensando believes that tackling the edge problem involves getting companies’ data centers to be as flexible as cloud-computing severs. To do so, it’s necessary to balance baked-in hardware capabilities with software programmability, according to Matus. The company had to untangle a lot of design challenges in its first two years of life. It found a key piece of the puzzle in the domain-specific P4 programming language for controlling packet-forwarding planes in networking devices. It developed a Distributed Services Card (DSC) based on a programmable processor optimized to execute P4 programs. 

Pensando’s software-defined edge services platform is the first secure, programmable platform to directly address the massive shift of data toward the edge, the company says. It can essentially deliver a full software stack — cloud, compute, networking, storage and security — wherever data is located. It positions the company in prime condition to compete with market leader Amazon Web Services Inc.’s Nitro System.

Matus envisions Pensando becoming both a market leader and a thought leader in domain-specific processing at the edge over the next three years. He does not see companies innovating smaller, less substantial edge solutions as much of a threat. 

“We’ve been fortunate enough that we’re building the entire system; we go from the transistors to the restful APIs. We have the entire stack,” he said.

The company’s mission to “democratize the cloud” will barrel forward even as COVID-19 creates an uncertain landscape for startups.

“Unfortunately COVID’s here, but this is our year of growth. This is the year that we really bring it out into the world with our partners and our customers and show how this technology has been developed and will benefit customers over the next year, two years,” Matus concluded. 

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Pensando’s Future Proof Your Enterprise event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Future Proof Your Enterprise event. Neither Pensando Systems Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: Francis Matus