A wireless executive and a software developer met up at the MWC event in Barcelona, Spain, last year. “It took an hour and a half before they figured each other out,” said Packet co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer Jacob Smith.

No, this is not the start to a bad joke. It’s a true story that Smith says illustrates how mobile operators and software developers often seem to speak two different languages. When it comes to edge computing, however, these two groups are going to need to learn how to communicate.

Edge computing opens up a whole new world for mobile operators in terms of what services they can deliver as well as for software developers that are writing the code. This also presents a massive new economic opportunity for both — one recent study says it will surpass $4.1 trillion by 2030.

But to bring these new edge uses cases to market, operators and developers need to work together. This sounds easy enough, but for two groups that aren’t used to doing so it presents challenges and a steep learning curve. By now, most it not all operators have realized the benefits of virtualization and the need to cloudify their operations. Still, telecom operators are used to slow production and software development cycles, and change — both in terms of technology and culture — takes time.

Getting Cloudier

Meanwhile, developers, as the saying goes, like to move fast and break things.

“Operators are looking for market-leading use cases that they can build a plan around and productize, like MPLS or 4G, and very long product planning cycles around that,” said Packet CEO Zachary Smith, who is also Jacob Smith’s twin brother. “But the edge is very small and fast moving with undefinable investment cycles and return profits. And that’s creating some confusion with operators. Especially with developers — they change things like shoes go out of style — and it’s really hard for operators to wrap their heads around that.”

Plus, as the name implies, operators are used to operating a network, which Zachary Smith compares to a walled, medieval castle. “Inside the castle they are farming vegetables, but the problem is they are slowly starting inside their walls,” he said. “The need more land and more trade, but they forgot to build a door, and there’s not a good way for people to come in and out of that castle.”

Operators sold off their multi-tenant data centers, which provided a way to trade vegetables, he said, continuing with the metaphor. But now operators are realizing that they need to go outside the castle walls or else they will starve to death. “It might be dangerous, we might meet the infidels, but let’s expose ourselves. Now, in the cloud, that’s just how it happened.”

In addition to being open ecosystems where developers can easily plug in using APIs and platform extensions, public clouds are global platforms with a uniform set of tools and consistent user experience.

Operators, on the other hand, “have always been challenged by limited reach and geographic coverage,” said Eric Braun, chief commercial officer at MobiledgeX. “Developers have spent the past nearly 15 years getting acclimated and realizing the value to cloud. One of the key benefits to cloud is that it’s global. Developers don’t have to think about regional players. Even how we were set up as a company speaks to the fact that operators are generally aware that in order to appeal to the developers they have to be global.”

Braun’s speaking to the fact that German operator Deutsche Telekom founded MobiledgeX. And while the edge computing startup is based in San Francisco, its first public mobile edge network went live in Germany with DT.

Speeding Up Edge Business Models

Because edge computing requires operators to address a global footprint, “that has to be done through a single, programmatic interface and a universal, economic model that’s applied to a globally distributed infrastructure,” Braun continued. “And there has to be a unified operational model as well.”

And to address these operator needs, MobiledgeX developed a global platform that connects developers to mobile operators by aggregating existing operator network resources. The company last week said it now counts 30 “category-defining developer applications” — these are cutting-edge type apps — and 13 top-tier mobile operators as part of its global edge network initiative. In addition to Deutsche Telekom, these include SK Telecom and Telus. It hasn’t yet named the other 10.

Earlier this summer the company made available three years of proprietary edge use case research and launched an interactive Edge Navigator tool in an effort to help speed up edge business models and deployments. The research, which came from interviews with more than 200 global businesses, found multi-player and cloud gaming; vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications; and industrial IoT to be among the most viable near-term edge use cases. And the Navigator tool, which was built and based on the company’s edge use case research project, provides an interactive market to explore likely edge use cases based on a specific vertical or geography, for example.

“MobiledgeX says let us bring you a business case for edge computing, and we make this happen over and over, all around the world for operators,” Braun said.

Partnering With Cloud Providers

When it comes to working with developers on edge use cases, mobile operators should team up with cloud providers, said Matt Trifiro, chief marketing officer of Vapor IO. In February, Vapor IO launched the Kinetic Edge Alliance. The group plans to roll out edge infrastructure in 30 metropolitan markets across the U.S. building on Vapor IO’s Kinetic Edge architecture. This uses software-defined interconnection and high-speed networking to combine multiple micro-data centers into a single, virtual facility. Chicago is the first Kinetic Edge city with three sites online.

“Cloud operators are going to play an absolutely essential role,” Trifiro said. That’s because cloud operators have access to a magnitude larger pool of developers compared to operators, he explained. “Plus the developers you want actually building edge apps are going to want to use the most modern cloud protocols. Frankly, developers, especially millennial developers, have become so accustomed to using modern tooling. It’s very hard to hire the best developers without providing them the best cloud tools.”

How do operators partner with cloud providers? It’s a business negotiation, Trifiro says. While each will take a different approach, “the ones that solve it the most quickly are going to have an advantage. If I were a telco, I’d resist the urge to put up a walled garden approach and work with the cloud providers.”

In addition to working with the big three — Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud — operators should also consider content delivery network (CDN) providers, which are already doing some interesting and innovative work in edge computing. “The CDNs understand edge even better than the cloud providers, and the fact that they are starting to look like cloud providers presents an interesting dynamic in the market,” Trifiro said.

Teaming Up With Edge Platforms

This includes companies like StackPath, which was founded by Lance Crosby in 2015. Crosby also founded SoftLayer, which IBM bought in 2013, and used as the backbone of its cloud.

StackPath provides CDN, cloud, and security services including web application firewall and DDoS protection. “We’re an edge services and security company,” said Justin Johnson, VP of developer relations at StackPath. “Think of it like a CDN and a cloud company had a baby.”

The company also manages and owns its infrastructure: a 65 Tb/s global network with customized hardware, redundant tier-one carrier connections, and full stack deployment in each of its data center locations. “We’re not a cloud replacement,” Johnson said. “Typically what we’re seeing our customers do is take a microservice or a piece of their application and distribute it closer to their users. This is for very latency-sensitive applications like ad serving, which is very competitive — that’s a big use case.”

Section is another startup born out of the CDN space. It built an edge compute platform that allows developers to run applications across a federated network of compute providers including AWS, Azure, Google, Digital Ocean, and Packet.

When it comes to edge computing, developers want flexibility and control over their apps without having to worry about the complexity around distributed computing, said Section co-founder and CTO Daniel Bartholomew.

“Developers want to be able to build a piece of software and submit it to a system and have really good control over that,” he said. “They don’t want to be forced into some specific technology choice. They want to write in the language that they want to write it in, and when their software is running in a large distribute edge they don’t want to have to think about, ‘is it working in Denver? Boulder? San Jose?’ They need to have a perspective on the system as though it was running in one place without losing any of the benefits of running it in many places.”

And while Rafay Systems doesn’t have roots in CDN, it makes it easier to deploy and scale applications across a distributed environment and multiple clouds via an automation framework for app lifecycle management.

“If I go to a developer and I say, ‘I’m going to give you access to 100 Kubernetes clusters, go crazy,’ they are not going to come,” said Rafay CEO Haseeb Budhani. “If they go from three to 100 locations, they don’t have the tooling. So we need to give developers two things: we need to solve for abstraction, and we need to solve for distribution. Developers don’t want to think about the underlying infrastructure.”

For this reason, “telcos are a great channel for us,” because Rafay’s platform sits on top of native Kubernetes and managed Kubernetes services, and it provides application abstraction, Budhani said. It also solves the distribution problem by allowing multi-cluster federation.

Rafay is working with several telcos globally on retail edge use cases such as personalized shopping apps for customers and apps that allow retailers to monitor in-store refrigeration equipment, for example, from inside the stores themselves.

“The one resource that telcos have that is unique is real estate, they have presence,” Budhani said. “Plus, if you look at a Verizon or an AT&T, they deploy a managed service inside a Walmart location or a Gap, there is gear in these stores that was provisioned by a telco. There’s real estate in the network, and real estate that these telcos control inside retail or hospital locations. We see that as our future, and we see it as an enabler for telcos to go make money. They have the real estate, they just have to make it palatable to the developers.”

Opening Up the Castle Walls

Another option for operators involves throwing open the castle walls and inviting developers in to play. Packet’s Zachary Smith points to Sprint’s Curiosity IoT network as an example. “They’ve embraced this concept of B2D — business to developer — and how does an operator engage with that B2D economy, which, frankly is where the innovation is occurring.”

Sprint built an entirely separate network from its core network on top of Packet’s bare-metal cloud, and its IoT Factory connects buyers looking for IoT solutions with the developers that are building them. “No one buys connectivity just for shits and giggles,” Smith said. “You have to have that ecosystem.”

“The potential for innovation by developers and that whole concept of B2D is the value add,” added Jacob Smith. “That’s all the use case they are all looking for. It just doesn’t have a name like autonomous driving.”

Creating test labs for developers — similar to what operators including AT&T and Verizon and equipment makers like Samsung already do — is another way to invite developers inside the castle walls and spur innovation and edge use cases, he said. This is also what Packet does with its cloud.

“We have a cloud. People come, use it, break it, and they tell you stuff. And they say, ‘hey wouldn’t it be cool to do this,’” Jacob Smith said. “That feedback loop is very valuable.”

“The operators don’t want to be seen as dumb pipes and dumb compute,” Zachary Smith added. “But that’s the secret. Start kinda dumb, or primitive, listen hard, and then productize your way into value.”