ZEDEDA Software: Taking Computing to the Edge

ZEDEDA has closed $26 million in Series B funding, capping a period of exponential growth.

With its latest funding round announced July 21, the California-based software company has now raised more than $55 million since its inception five years ago.

Management said the past 12 months have seen a sharp increase in growth with revenue up 7 times year-over-year, which ZEDEDA attributes to existing customers applying the company’s solution across different edge deployments and to new customers beginning their edge deployments.  

ZEDEDA said it will use the latest round of funding to support its expanding customer base, accelerate research and development and expand its marketing and sales operations.  The ecosystem around ZEDEDA’s solution for edge computing has attracted strategic partnerships and integrations with Google, Microsoft, PTC, and SUSE. 

Data collected by the oil industry must be processed and transmitted to the people who work with it, but where that processing occurs is changing. 

It wasn’t so long ago that the industry started trusting in cloud computing, but now companies are beginning to call on edge computing to take care of processing needs locally—wherever data is generated—such as at a wireline job.

This makes remote computing more reliable and efficient because resources are deployed at their various sites of origination instead of a single central location.

But edge computing does require an operating system to work, and oil and gas companies require the system to be secure and safe.

Data gravity refers to the tendency of data created in the cloud tending to run in the cloud, with data generated in other areas tending to remain in those locations. 

“Cloud computing is great, and the economics of cloud computing are great,” said ZEDEDA’s CEO and co-founder, Said Ouissal.

But as various technologies have improved, the world has “started to connect billions of devices to the edge of the network.”  

“The data gravity is shifting away from the cloud,” he said.

“You don’t trust the user, you don’t trust the hardware, you don’t trust the network, you don’t even trust yourself. Cybersecurity is an ongoing battle. Hackers are always trying new things, but we built that into our way of thinking.”—Said Ouissal, ZEDEDA

One reason is that bandwidth constraints hampered data upload speeds because such technologies like 4G wireless were built for fast downloads and slow uploads.

“This is where things started to not make sense,” Ouissal said. “There was too much data for the bandwidth.” 

So because the industry cannot get the data to the cloud, it has to move to the edge, he said.
“At the highest level, edge computing comes after cloud computing,” he said.

ZEDEDA’s orchestration and management software is like an operating system for the edge, Ouissal said, and oil and gas companies have been using it to handle “data heavy” tasks in wide-ranging locations. Pipelines and facilities may have thousands of distributed assets that are connected to the internet generating data that needs to be processed, he noted.

A wireline company previously would send a probe downhole to collect data that was sent back up to a truck at the surface, where a computer would record the details.

“The mapping of the well, it was a huge data file,” Ouissal said. 

In the absence of edge computing, the process may have taken weeks for the file to be sent back to the office via truck or copied to a hard drive and shipped to an operator, where data analytics would have been run, he said.

Edge computing vastly speeds up the process.

“What used to take weeks is now immediately done,” he said.

A wind energy company deployed ZEDEDA in a wind turbine to predict failure of turbines before they happened to reduce maintenance costs and downtime, he said.

ZEDEDA’s edge orchestration and management solution is a software as a service (SAAS) offering, and its core is open source. To function, Project Eve open-source software is required to run ZEDEDA’s cloud-based product.

The software is purpose-built for the edge and relies on a zero-trust security model. The philosophy in cybersecurity, Ouissal said, is to trust nothing.

“You don’t trust the user, you don’t trust the hardware, you don’t trust the network, you don’t even trust yourself,” he said. “Cybersecurity is an ongoing battle. Hackers are always trying new things, but we built that into our way of thinking.”

But the oil and gas industry also has additional requirements, particularly in potentially explosive environments.

“One customer said, ‘we need a way to tell your system to shut down all the wireless communications’ similar to airplane mode on a phone” because communications must be down in certain areas or during certain types of operations, Ouissal said, a need that ZEDEDA accommodated.