Verizon tips MEC as key to Industry 4.0

INTERVIEW: Verizon Enterprise executive Jim Kilmer (pictured) pointed to mobile edge computing (MEC) as the missing piece needed to enable the Fourth Industrial Revolution, noting its combination with 5G will overcome barriers to realising the full potential of smart manufacturing technologies.

The group VP of vertical market sales told Mobile World Live latency and capacity restrictions had limited the ability to deliver near real-time industrial services. MEC removes such barriers, enabling improvements to AR and VR, autonomous vehicles, predictive maintenance and more.

“Think of safety. You can’t run autonomously-guided vehicles unless you can know where they are and where the humans are. So it’s a pretty significant game changer in that area.”

Kilmer highlighted Verizon’s work on MEC with Amazon Web Services, along with a partnership with IBM, which he said will boost analytics capabilities for industrial applications.

But he said there remains a challenge in changing the “vision and innovation mindset” of enterprises.

“We’re trying to show our customers a variety of different use cases because, even if it doesn’t apply to their specific environment, it transfers easily. The biggest thing we’re trying to do is get them on the journey and show them that these are real life examples.”