Nokia Networks and IBM appear to have piqued Vodafone’s interest with their mobile edge computing platform, first announced at Mobile World Congress. The Wall Street Journal reports that Vodafone is testing the platform, with help from the Imperial College of London.
The purpose of the mobile edge computing platform is to bring data center applications directly to the mobile base station. The platform leverages software from both Nokia and IBM, specifically Nokia’s Liquid applications and IBM’s WebSphere.
The mobile edge initiative is particularly interesting at a time when many operators are busy looking for ways to move functionality out of the network and virtualize it in data centers. This type of solution moves applications closer to the end user, not further away, and involves both hardware and software.
“Pushing applications, processing and storage to the edge of the mobile network allows large complex problems to be distributed into many smaller and more manageable pieces and to be physically located at the source of the information it needs to work on,” said Phil Buckellew, VP of IBM Mobile Enterprise. “This enables a huge amount of rich data to be processed in real time that would be prohibitively complex and costly to deliver on a traditional centralized cloud.”
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