VMware, Dell Technologies, and a group of cloud and edge infrastructure companies formed the Open Grid Alliance today to foster a re-architected internet. The group, which also includes DriveNets, MobiledgeX, and PacketFabric, wants the internet to converge as a shared platform for distributed compute, data, and intelligence at the edge. 

The alliance said it intends to pull expertise and resources from tech companies that traverse the entire network stack, including infrastructure hardware, SDN, virtualization, automation, and applications, to develop a more expansive framework and principles for interoperable technologies.

“In today’s technology landscape, all the action is happening at the edge. The list of interactive applications that distributed edge computing will enable keeps getting longer. And yet, when we look closely at many of them, we reach an unavoidable conclusion: There is no single location for the edge. It’s nowhere. But, everywhere,” Kaniz Mahdi, VMware’s VP of advanced technologies, wrote in response to questions. 

“To unleash truly transformative innovations at the edge, what we need is a fungible edge. One that stitches together the right level of compute resources, in the right place, at the right time, driven by application intent,” she explained. 

The alliance suggests the dynamics and market forces at play today are too narrow to fulfill the broad requirements of edge computing, and its founding members have signed a manifesto to clarify its vision. “We are moving from an era of humans talking to machines at the core into an era of machines talking to machines at the edge. We need a next-generation internet, built from the edge in,” the companies wrote.

Cloud providers, developers, vendors, network operators, and service providers all have a role to play and specialized needs that must be addressed to deliver on the full promise of edge computing, the group contends. 

“As exciting as emerging edge technologies from hyperscale cloud providers and telecommunications service providers might be, the truth of the matter is that it’s near impossible for one technology provider to deliver this vision,” Mahdi wrote. “The edge is just too distributed, too dynamic, and too heterogeneous for a singular service provider to tackle it all.”

The vision calls for hardware and software providers to construct a “truly fungible edge” that will “upend the way we think about the edge — and eventually the internet itself,” she added. 

The companies expect this process to begin with sweeping virtualization in data centers, followed by a virtualization of networking. It then expects to define principles that allow virtualization to supply the proper amount of compute needed for each application, which it views as akin to a “compute grid.” And finally, “with a compute grid in place, we plan to take on the more interesting challenge of virtualizing the control to enable universal autonomy with an intelligence grid, our ultimate ambition with the Open Grid,” Mahdi explained. 

This far-reaching prospect requires deep collaboration across the wireless, cloud, and networking industries, and it must include many competing technologies that stakeholders are willing to make interoperable in a neutral framework, she added.

“The Open Grid is the inevitable evolution of the internet,” the group explained in its manifesto. “Like the power grid, from which it gathers its metaphorical inspiration, the Open Grid will be a software-defined system that stretches across the globe to support multi-cloud services via fungible resources that are employed, when and where they are needed, on demand, and with guarantees and service-level agreements.”