SAN JOSE, Calif. -- The Eclipse Foundation today announced the launch of the Edge Native Working Group, a vendor-neutral and code-first industry collaboration that will drive the evolution and broad adoption of open source software for edge computing. With edge computing code from the foundation already deployed in production environments, the Edge Native Working Group is focused on the near-term creation of an end-to-end software stack that will support deployments of today's most transformative technologies, including the Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), autonomous vehicles, and more. Founding members of the Edge Native Working Group include ADLINK, Bosch, Edgeworx, Eurotech, Huawei, Intel, Kynetics, and Siemens.

"Edge computing has emerged over the past few years as the way to process data and deliver services for AI, autonomous vehicles, 5G, IoT, and important industrial use cases by leveraging distributed, localized compute," said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. "Within the Eclipse community, we already have a mature code base of open source edge computing platforms with production deployments in the field. The Eclipse Foundation is happy to host this vendor-neutral industry collaboration to accelerate the adoption of distributed applications at the edge."

Edge computing, a distributed computing architecture that brings compute power and storage physically closer to applications in order to improve performance and increase efficiency, is forecast to generate a market worth $16.5 billion within the next five years (Allied Market Research, 2019). The Eclipse Foundation already hosts production-ready code that enables developers to quickly build, deploy, and manage applications at the edge at enterprise scale.

The working group's purview will encompass the two flagship projects currently at the Eclipse Foundation including Eclipse ioFog and Eclipse fog05, as well as other projects that are yet to be announced. In addition to the code that the Eclipse Foundation has already released, the Edge Native Working Group will focus on the development of various layers of software at the network edge that will enable others to build customized applications for their own specific implementations. This includes applications for retail, carrier environments, 5G, IoT, and Industry 4.0 or smart manufacturing deployments. Regardless of the applications needed, the Edge Native Working Group will help to solve the challenges endemic to edge computing; a heterogenous hardware landscape, low bandwidth, latency, limited power, and security.

"The Eclipse Foundation is doing the same thing for edge computing that it did for IoT," said Kilton Hopkins, co-founder and CEO for Edgeworx, Inc. and Eclipse ioFog project lead. "We're acknowledging that edge computing has its own requirements, challenges, and industry-wide concerns that are different from those found in all other sectors. There's enough going on in the industry that it's time to address the particular challenges associated with edge computing in a very focused way."

The Eclipse Foundation has a proven track record of enabling developer-focused open source software collaboration and innovation earned over 15 years. The Foundation's IoT community alone represents one of the largest open source collaborations in the world spanning 41 projects from more than 40 members and over 4 million lines of code produced. Overall, the Foundation's more than 370 collaborative projects have resulted in over 195 million lines of code — a $10 billion shared investment.

Eclipse Foundation