South Korea’s Samsung Electronics Co., leading global manufacturer of consumer electronics and mobile devices, has joined a global project named EdgeX Foundry to step up its efforts to develop edge computing for industrial applications.

Edge computing is a distributed computing technology that enables devices to process data near its sources rather than sending it to the cloud. It has been emerging as a new solution to complement cloud computing as the proliferation of robotic technology, Internet of Things (IoT) devices and autonomous cars requires faster data analysis and sound security.

According to industry sources on Monday, the Korean tech giant has recently decided to participate in EdgeX Foundry project launched in April by the Linux Foundation. The initiative joined by 60 global companies including the U.S. chip maker Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Japan’s electronic products manufacturer Toshiba and French defense company Thales aims at establishing an open source framework for IoT edge computing and developing interoperability across systems. The U.S. Dell Technologies Inc. has seeded the project by contributing its Fuse IoT code base. Samsung Electronics has joined it as a Platinum member, the highest rank.

Samsung Electronics is said to be highly interested in developing industrial applications of edge computing that could be applied to smart manufacturing it has been pursuing for its factories across its businesses from semiconductor to consumer electronics, according to sources.

“It (EdgeX Foundry) will enable us to create lightweight edge solutions that can support real-time operations for our manufacturing infrastructures,” Kyeongwoon Lee, Senior Vice President at Samsung Electronics, said, quoted in a press release by the Linux Foundation.

A growing number of industries and companies are also actively seeking to deploy smart factory solutions to improve manufacturing efficiency. General Electric (GE) has been leading the industrial IoT sector with its Predix platform that combines cloud and edge computing.

An official from Samsung Electronics said edge computing is expected to offer a wide range of new opportunities from the industrial IoT sector such as smart factories to the mobile industry. The U.S. smartphone maker Apple has recently teamed up with GE to develop an operating system enabling industrial data analysis via iPhone or iPad.

By Lee Jae-chul and Choi Mira

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