Microsoft CTO: Edge Computing Can Make Industries 'Massively More Efficient'

There's so much opportunity with the new architecture, he says, that he wishes he was still a developer. "There's a whole class of things that we're able to do with the intelligent edge that were economically infeasible or outright impossible before," he said. In edge computing, data is processed and analyzed on or near the device where it's generated instead of first being sent to a corporate cloud or data center. This way, devices ranging from drones to elevators, factory machines and self-driving cars can compute and analyze data in real-time without always relying on connectivity to a corporate cloud. Microsoft announced in April it would invest $5 billion in Internet of Things-related technologies -- of which edge computing is a major component. There will be an estimated 25.1 billion devices connected to the internet by 2021, up from 6.3 billion in 2016, according to recent research from Gartner Inc.