Edge Computing supporting new business models

To support this scenario and bring its infrastructures and services closer to the customer, Sparkle has embarked on a path of evolution of its infrastructure. This path focuses on first integrating the cloud functionality, then edge services, into the network’s PoPs, thus bringing the computational and storage capacity closer to the customers’ offices. This reduces the access latency to these resources and mitigates the issues of reliability and security associated with long transmission routes. As Antonelli explains, an edge program has been launched on existing PoPs. It is based on hyper-convergent technology and is designed to encompass a mix of processing, networking and storage capacities to avoid the need for separate technologies. It’s an infrastructure that Sparkle has already started to ‘fully’ exploit the voice communication platform to software solutions that run on the edge, while also allowing customers to enable new business scenarios such as IoT, even in the absence of proprietary infrastructure.

Thanks to the design consultancy of Net Reply – a Reply group company focused on network innovation solutions for telco, utilities and large companies – Sparkle has also decided to launch a project to enable the efficient use of its distributed and highly disaggregated computing platform. To achieve this, Net Reply designed and proposed a high-level orchestration model, introducing a so-called service orchestrator into the architectural design. The orchestrator is capable of accommodating user service requests, collecting computing, network and various other technological domain resources, and ‘building’ the service in an optimal way with respect to the customer's requirements. This favours territorial proximity when possible, to ensure data compliance with the applicable regulation, or keeping the service close to the user to reduce latency and enable new scenarios and services.