Ask the Expert: What Does It Mean When a Technology Company Uses the Term “Edge”?

When we launched the “Ask the Expert” blog series last year here on Your Edge, one of our primary goals was to breakdown the business and technology buzzwords that elude many people – sometimes, even those of us who use them in our daily vernacular. So far, we’ve covered everything from blockchain, machine learning and artificial intelligence to the Internet of Things and NITs.

Today, we are taking a close look at the meaning of the term “edge.” After all, we use this term frequently as part of our tagline: “Capture Your Edge,” and we focus on the importance of gathering and leveraging data and intelligence at the “edge of the enterprise.”

At first, many people assumed we were talking about the ways in which Zebra helps customers gain a competitive advantage…which we were. But as our solution portfolio started expanding and we started talking about new ways in which customers could use data capture technologies at the edge of the enterprise in combination with IoT engines to generate more actionable intelligence, some started to ask if we were talking about edge computing.

The use of the term “edge” is further compounded when we talk about how organizations can use technology to gain an “operational edge,” “intelligence edge” and “performance edge.”

I recently sat down with Zebra’s Chief Marketing Officer, Jeff Schmitz, to get his insights into the various uses of the term “edge” including the meaning behind our “Capture Your Edge” tagline.

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