Since my last blog on Edge Computing, I have been contemplating Lynx’s positioning with regard to safety or security. Are we providing security or safety? The short answer is that we provide both. But the slightly longer answer is more interesting.

The technology industry loves its buzzwords and acronyms. Every couple of years it seems there is something new that will cause a paradigm shift, that the world will be “turned upside down,” etc. Bill Gates once said, “We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.” One of the newer terms to appear is “Edge Computing.” Predictably, there are people forecasting seismic changes in the world order. To quote Peter Venkman from Ghostbusters: “Human sacrifice, dogs, and cats living together—mass hysteria.” The reality is less dramatic than a paradigm shift; namely that systems oscillate back and forth from centralized processing to distributed models. A year ago, Gartner placed Edge near the peak of the hype cycle. Really, all Edge Computing relates to is an understandable shift of the intelligence back nearer to where data is created.

The world has changed drastically since my last blog at the end of February. We had just returned from Embedded World, but of course today it’s all about webinars, video and additional technical content in lieu of physical tradeshows. I had planned to write about the world of Lynx marketing in the current (and hopefully soon-to-be post) COVID-19 era… Then Arun, my colleague that runs the engineering team, posted his blog about life in this new normal, so I felt I had to pivot to another theme...