Today, HP is announcing the compatibility of IBM Edge Application Manager for managing Edge deployments powered by HP Engage Edge.

In Aug 2020, HP announced HP Engage Edge, the world's first retail product powered by the EdgeX framework.

The product is designed to help Retailers and ISVs accelerate the deployment of their on-premise, sensor-based solutions developed to improve the business metrics of their Retail and Hospitality customers. With IBM's Edge Application Manager powered by the open source Open Horizon project, the solution becomes even more versatile with the autonomous deployment of container-based apps and analytics for targeted use cases.

The Retail Transformation

In the past few years, the retail market has gone through a major transformation powered by technology. Like any modern business, collecting and acting on relevant data in real time is critical to effective decision making for business owners. Many Retail & Hospitality businesses have been deploying sensor-based solutions to solve key business and operational challenges including inventory management, workforce optimization, theft detection and promotion effectiveness. The current global pandemic has only accelerated these investments significantly. According to The State of Edge 2020: A Market and Ecosystem Report for Edge Computing report from the Linux Foundation, over 20% of retail establishments by the top 100 retailers will have implemented digital services that require edge capabilities. According to the same report, the global Infrastructure Edge CAPEX for retail is forecast to reach $6.5 billion by 2028. According to the Gartner report, Exploring the Edge: 12 Frontiers of Edge Computing, by the end of 2023, more than 50% of large enterprises will deploy at least six edge computing use cases deployed for IoT immersive experiences, versus less than 1% in 2019.

HP Engage Edge

There are a few limitations of historical, mostly cloud-based solutions - They are either standalone (focused on 1-2 use cases), or they are custom-built & proprietary. Many times, within the same retail premises, data is trapped in several different proprietary, siloed implementations. Since each use case needs its own set of sensors (or data streams), ISVs are forced to custom-build their solutions making it harder for them to scale across deployments, or even share the data streams. This fact also limits the retailers from integrating all the data sources to create meaningful & cohesive business insights. Moreover, many retailers are already looking to avoid cloud lock-ins due to costs and connectivity or privacy issues. Edge Compute helps solve these and the latency issues to create real time actionable insights that the store manager or associates can act on in real time. All these factors demand the deployment of Edge solutions.

IBM Edge Application Manager

As retailers re-think and accelerate their digital transformation plans in the age of Covid-19, they are requiring increasing capabilities performed wholly within the retail premises. In-store process automation, analytics, real-time interactions, and privacy-preserving services can be provided by edge-native applications deployed and managed by IBM Edge Application Manager. IBM Edge Application Manager is designed to provide continuity of business for this local processing in the event of network outages or periods of increased latency with solutions built for this approach. And IBM Edge Application Manager is designed to allow single operators to easily manage web-scale application and ML model deployments to tens of thousands of edge nodes in thousands of locations. Additionally, HP Engage Edge and IBM Edge Application Manager can also be the basis for retail solutions developed to share a common infrastructure, leverage common security practices, and employ a common idioms for support and service. HP and IBM intend to support the development of these solutions through the Open Retail Reference Architecture (ORRA).

Accelerating Edge Deployments

Now out of the box, HP Engage Edge offers

Choice of HP's world class Retail hardware portfolio purposefully designed for the harsh Retail & Hospitality environments and backed by HP's warranty & service options. The first version utilizes HP's MP9 system based on 8th Generation Intel Core Desktop Processor Family.

The world's first retail product from HP powered by the EdgeX framework. The software stack is built on this sensor-agnostic & cloud-agnostic open framework. It facilitates easier data-ingestion for onsite processing and runs on a compact, secure HP ThinPro OS.

Ability to seamlessly manage the apps & containers remotely with IBM Edge Application Manager.

Altogether, this is designed to help ISVs & solution builders avoid custom implementations and build scalable solutions that free them to focus on their core competencies building analytics and insights. HP Engage Edge can power dozens of use cases like Inventory Management, Shelf replenishment, Loss prevention, Workforce management, Customer Engagement etc. Depending on the problem statement at hand, different sensors can be integrated into the product to assess and manage a variety of business metrics. For example, adding an RFID stream could help manage inventory and in-store tracking. In other cases, cameras can be deployed for computer-vision based analytics for customer engagement.

Come, Join Us!

If you are an ISV or an internal developer or a technology enabler company focused on Retail or Hospitality, we would like to hear from you. Contact HP if you have a use case or a problem statement that you'd like to work together on or discuss other possibilities. You can find more info on IBM Edge Application Manager at this link.

Contact:

Conor Driscoll

Email: Conor.Driscoll@hp.com

(C) 2021 Electronic News Publishing, source ENP Newswire