Mimik aims to create a decentralized platform for the edge

Where is the edge? If you ask different people you get very different responses. Telco executives will tell you the edge lives in their data centers at the base of cell towers or in local central offices. Factory operations folks will cite gateways inside their plants. And people like me will look to cellphones or even sensors as the actual edge of the network.

No matter where the edge is, it’s not in the cloud. Yet going forward, increasing amounts of data will be generated and processed at the edge. And this creates a need for a different style of computing, one that can handle processing both locally at an edge and also in the cloud, where some data will inevitably end up. It’s why when you talk to the cloud companies, their solution is a combination of edge-based software that extends their cloud platforms, such as AWS Greengrass or Azure IoT Hub. But when you talk to companies building out distributed IoT platforms, they are betting on a different architecture entirely.

Their focus is on a new type of application framework designed to run entirely at the edge, whether that edge is a gateway or even a cellphone. One startup with such a focus in Mimik.

Mimik didn’t start out as a distributed IoT platform. The company began in 2009 with a focus on serving the telco market. But in 2017, its management realized that IoT was driving computing to the edge, for a number of reasons. So they changed the strategy and built an operating system and service to help companies manage applications and compute at the farthest edge of sensors and cellphones.

That shift led to a $14.3 million funding round this past November and helped Mimik sign a large telco and automotive customer. Customers use Mimik’s real-time operating system and software running on their devices to handle the orchestration of computing on different devices. For this to work, the devices need Mimik’s software and developers must use Mimik’s edgeEngine to build their apps.

The result is that if an application needs to find a set amount of processing power and RAM to complete a job, the Mimik software orchestrates that discovery across all the devices running its software.

Customers can use Mimik’s software to cut the amount of data they send to the cloud by up to 70%, which is a huge decrease in bandwidth and data storage costs. It also makes clear why Microsoft and Amazon aren’t fans of real distributed computing and would rather invest in a form of hybrid edge and cloud computing.

I, however, am excited by the opportunities here, because this means we could compute locally on networks without ever having to send data to the cloud. This is good for privacy, resiliency, and for lowering latency. It can also help us take advantage of existing computer resources that might be idle most of the time, and apply their excess capacity in ways that prevent us from needing to buy even more machines.

The genius of the cloud was that engineers saw a way to portion off and use excess capacity in a responsive and flexible way. This was great for using the millions of servers that Amazon or Google had to have on hand to perform their regular money-making tasks. Today we find ourselves swimming in cellphones, home hubs, cars, overpowered routers, and more. And all of them have spare compute capacity, which a platform like Mimik can harness to run applications that require quick response times or close control of data.

Keep an eye on Mimik and other startups trying to bring more processing to the edge. I really believe one of these startups will end up creating the next computing architecture.