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Bringing It All Together: LF Edge Ecosystem and Membership Continue to Grow

By Arti Loftus
May 13, 2020

Getting the IoT and Industrial IoT to scale has not been easy but by harmonizing across many different domains – up and down the technology stack – the LF Edge is continuing to lead in bringing disciplines together even as the commercial industry continues to invest.

Under the leadership of Arpit Joshipura, this non-profit organization, designed to support more open approaches (leveraging Linux), is continuing to cultivate and curate partnerships and integrations across the spectrum.

LF Edge recently announced that Open Horizon, an application and metadata delivery platform, is now part of their ecosystem, as a Stage 1 (At-Large) Project, while welcoming new members who bring a range of R&D expertise in Telco, Enterprise and Cloud Edge Infrastructure.

LF Edge is an umbrella organization under The Linux Foundation that “aims to establish an open, interoperable framework for edge computing independent of hardware, silicon, cloud, or operating system,” according to the organization. They recently announced continued project momentum with the addition a new project and several technical milestones for EdgeX Foundry, Akraino Edge Stack and Fledge, while welcoming seven new members including CloudBrink, Federated Wireless, Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), Kaloom, Ori Industries, Tensor Networks and VoerEir to its ecosystem.

Open Horizon, an existing project contributed by IBM, is a platform for managing the service software lifecycle of containerized workloads and related machine learning assets. It enables autonomous management of applications deployed to distributed webscale fleets of edge computing nodes and devices without requiring on-premise administrators.

Open Horizon enables the autonomous management of more than 10,000 edge devices simultaneously – that’s 20 times as many endpoints as in traditional solutions, according to the Foundation’s press release.

“We are thrilled to welcome Open Horizon and new members to the LF Edge ecosystem,” said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, Networking, Edge & IoT, the Linux Foundation. “These additions complement our deployment ready LF Edge open source projects and our growing global ecosystem.”

"LF Edge is bringing together some of the most significant open source efforts in the industry, said Todd Moore, IBM VP Open Technology, "We are excited to contribute the Open Horizon project as this will expand the work with the other projects and companies to create shared approaches, open standards, and common interfaces and APIs."

Open Horizon joins LF Edge’s other projects including: Akraino Edge Stack, Baetyl, EdgeX Foundry, Fledge, Home Edge, Project EVE and State of the Edge. These projects support emerging edge applications across areas such as non-traditional video and connected things that require lower latency, and faster processing and mobility.

“By forming a software stack that brings the best of cloud, enterprise and telecom, LF Edge helps to unify a fragmented edge market around a common, open vision for the future of the industry,” Joshipura said.

Milestones shared include 4.3 million docker downloads for EdgeX Foundry, and 6 Blueprint families and 14 specific Blueprints that have all tested and validated on hardware labs and can be deployed immediately in various industries including Connected Vehicle, AR/VR, Integrated Cloud Native NFV, Network Cloud and Tungsten Fabric and SDN-Enabled Broadband Access for Akraino Edge Stack.

Fledge, a Stage 1 project, is also starting to gain traction. LF Edge recently shared a race car use case optimizing car and driver operations using Google Cloud, Machine Learning and state-of-the-art digital twins and simulators.

State of the Edge merged under LF Edge earlier this month and will continue to pave the path as the industry’s first open research program on edge computing. Under the umbrella, State of the Edge will continue its assets including State of the Edge Reports, Open Glossary of Edge Computing and the Edge Computing Landscape. 

New members are enthusiastically supporting the LF Edge and its mission, including:

“LF Edge has become a critical point of collaboration for network and enterprise edge innovators in this new cloud-driven IT landscape,” said Kurt Schaubach, CTO, Federated Wireless. “We joined the LF Edge to apply our connectivity and spectrum expertise to helping define the State of the Edge, and are energized by the opportunity to contribute to the establishment of next generation edge compute for the myriad of low latency applications that will soon be part of private 5G networks.”

“ITRI is one of the world’s leading technology R&D institutions aiming to innovate a better future for society. Founded in 1973, ITRI has played a vital role in transforming Taiwan's industries from labor-intensive into innovation driven. We focus on the fields of Smart Living, Quality Health, and Sustainable Environment. Over the years, we also added a focus on 5G, AI, and Edge Computing related research and development. We joined LF Edge to leverage its leadership in these areas and to collaborate with the more than 75 member companies on projects like Akraino Edge Stack.”

“Kaloom is pleased to join LF Edge to collaborate with the community on developing open, cloud-native networking, management and orchestration for edge deployments” said Suresh Krishnan, chief technology officer, Kaloom.  “We are working on a unified edge solution in order to optimize the use of resources while meeting the exacting performance, space and energy efficiency needs that are posed by edge deployments. We look forward to contributing our expertise in this space and to collaborating with the other members in LF Edge in accelerating the adoption of open source software, hardware and standards that speed up innovation and reduce TCO.”

“At Ori, we are fundamentally changing how software interacts with the distributed hardware on mobile operator networks.” said Mahdi Yahya, Founder and CEO, Ori Industries. “We also know that developers can't provision, deploy and run applications seamlessly on telco infrastructure. We're looking forward to working closely with the LF Edge community and the wider open-source ecosystem this year, as we turn our attention to developers and opening up access to the distributed, telco edge."

"Tensor Networks believes in and supports open source. Having an arena free from the risks of IP Infringement to collaborate and develop value which can be accessible to more people and organizations is essential to our efforts. Tensor runs its organization and develops products on top of Linux.  The visions of LF Edge, where networks and latency are part of open software-based service composition and delivery, align with our vision of open, fast, smart, secure, connected, and customer driven opportunities across all industry boundaries." - Bill Walker, Chief Technology Officer.

“In our extensive work with industry leaders for NFVI/VIM test and benchmarking, a need to standardize infrastructure KPIs in Edge computing has gradually become more important,” said Arif Khan, Co-Founder of VoerEir AB. “This need has made it essential for us to join LF Edge and to initiate the new Feature Project "Kontour" under the Akraino umbrella. We are excited to collaborate with various industry leaders to define, standardize and measure Edge KPIs.”

LF Edge was founded last year and is supported by more than 70 members.


Arti Loftus is an experienced Information Technology specialist with a demonstrated history of working in the research, writing, and editing industry with many published articles under her belt.

Edited by Ken Briodagh
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