January 10, 2019

Baidu launches ‘Open Edge’ an open source edge platform along with AI boards for IoT

The platform seeks to provide edge services to enterprises by leveraging AI and IoT capabilities.

Chinese internet giant Baidu have launched an open source edge computing platform called Open Edge along with and AI-Box and an AI-Board for IoT. With these dual launches, Baidu seek to help enterprises collect data, distribute messages and perform on-device processing by offering a cloud-based management suite to control nodes, edge apps and resources.

According to Baidu, enterprises that build applications in the cloud need end-to-end connectivity since some applications are dependent on one another. They say that these applications form a flow, which is necessary for the functioning of day-to-day workloads.

By launching Open Edge, Baidu say that platform will provide enterprises with data that unlocks business insights for applications. They say that enterprises will be able to manage edge node, apps and perform on-device processing in case of a flaky network connection.

With the AI-Box and AI-Board, Baidu claim that they will facilitate object recognition capabilities to drones, hardware and robots and boost their IoT prowess. They also say that with the AI-Board and Box, enterprises can analyze data to gauge the effectiveness of their IoT products.

Analysts say that this move will catapult Baidu’s position in the Chinese internet market. It will be interesting to see how they make the most of these launches, following their alliance with AMD to deploy Epyc processors for cloud.