As we usher in 2018, one thing is certain: there will be a whole new set of predictions on what technologies will be hot in the coming year. Some of the early bets are in, and many of them mention fog. We’re seeing predictions that fog computing is one of the top five innovation trends for 2018 – and that cloud will morph into fog.

Rather than sit out on the crystal ball fun, we thought we’d share some facts about fog from the experts: OpenFog members. In December, we polled our global membership – global technology leaders, innovative startups, leading academic researchers – and asked them a few questions about fog. While this information has inherent biases – after all, they are the pioneers of fog computing – we uncovered some interesting insights that may be a bellwether for the year ahead.  Here’s what we found.

• CEOs are aware of fog computing initiatives within their organization and are continuing to invest in fog.  Over 40% of our members who took the survey indicated they have a higher budget for fog computing than in 2017; a mere 5% of responders indicated a smaller budget this year.  Fog investments in research are also up, with nearly 75% of responders anticipating more research grant funding opportunities.
• Organizationally, fog is most often seated in R&D, followed by New Ventures.
• IoT is the top application area for fog technology by a wide margin (70%), followed by industry-specific applications and 5G.
• Customers for fog solutions are most interested in fog to help solve latency and network bandwidth challenges. Security topped the list of concerns. 
• And finally, we asked our members to name the top two industries that will adopt fog.  Manufacturing, smart cities, and transportation headed that list, followed by energy, healthcare, and smart homes.

We’ll revisit these findings at a future date to learn more about the outcomes from their organizational support and spend on fog. In the meantime, for a more rigorous assessment of the future of fog, we invite you to download the 451 Research report on the Size and Impact of Fog Computing Market.  

Lynne Canavan is Vice President of Marketing of the OpenFog Consortium, the global nonprofit that is building an open, interoperable and secure architecture for fog computing. Its work is centered around creating an open fog computing architecture for efficient and reliable networks and intelligent endpoints combined with identifiable, secure, and privacy-friendly information flows between clouds, endpoints, and services based on open standard technologies.

eletter-01-05-2018