Respond to Customers in Real Time with Edge Activation

The ability to respond immediately to inputs from people, devices, and systems at the edge is central to enhancing the customer experience.

“Edge activation” has become an important infrastructure approach that enables marketers to deliver enhanced experiences to prospects and customers. In this Q&A, Anjul Bhambhri, vice president of platform engineering at Adobe, discusses the benefits of edge activation and how it can help your business.

What are the key benefits of using edge activation to improve the customer experience?

Every millisecond matters for enterprises when it comes to delivering relevant experiences to their customers. Delivering exceptional experiences has become difficult due to the volume of data created as a result of the proliferation of devices, channels, and content. According to a study by MIT Technology Review, 78% of companies struggle to digest and then analyze their current volume of data for “actioning” while it is relevant.

Edge computing enables capturing, processing, and “decisioning” at the edge where data originates, powering enterprises to deliver rich and relevant experiences in real time.

What are some of the common use cases for this solution?

Today, data is being processed and actioned at the edge in many unlikely places. This includes cars, drones, refrigerators, washing machines, fitness devices, and even pet collars. This is a natural outgrowth of the Internet of Things (IoT), which is capturing information of a variety, volume, and speed we’ve never seen before. Reaping all the advantages of connected devices depends on the ability to analyze and take action based on this data in real time.

Every industry can improve real-time experiences through edge decisioning and activation:

• A retailer can provide improved in-store experiences by delivering a personalized offer to a mobile application based on the items a customer is browsing.
• A streaming service can offer personalized recommendations on any device, from a TV to a tablet, based on the most recent content viewed.
• A hotel can deliver a personalized offer for a nearby restaurant, ride, or show based on past preferences and location.

What are some of the unique challenges to consider when moving to the edge?

CIOs need to carefully design their architecture to handle scale, latency, and uptime when adding edge activation to their technology stack. Let’s look at each individually:

Scale: The first step is to architect for the volume of data coming to the edge network.

Latency: CIOs must consider the layout of the edges for data that needs to be actioned in sub-milliseconds.

Uptime: The edge network must be architected and proven to deliver the uptime necessary for real-time edge activation.

What unique benefits and capabilities does Adobe’s solution provide?

Adobe has been pushing the boundaries of edge computing since it was introduced. Adobe Experience Platform is an open and extensible platform. It has a rich network of globally distributed edges that collect and process data. From this data, Adobe Experience Platform builds real-time customer profiles, which, in turn, are leveraged by decisioning services to deliver personalized experiences on the edge. Adobe Experience Platform brings together data from Adobe applications, IoT, and systems of record like CRM, ERP, and MDM.

For more information about the Adobe Experience Platform and edge activation, click here.

This article was originally published on cio.com.