From the MTN to the Horizon: 10 years of edge computing
Inception - Project MTN
Robin White:
I have the original paper Egan put together in response to Mac’s request – which Egan named “Project Mountain (MTN)”, and later became Blue Horizon, and our first readout deck to Exec mgmt on the concept. My records of the initial project / PoC shows a start date of Aug 5, 2015 (MTN Foundation & IoT PoC), and our first readout with Jim Comfort on Sept 17th, 2015. Egan then presented BlueHorizon.network to the IBM Sr. Execs at TT meeting in April 2016. Rob High later inherited our team in ~2Q/3Q 2018 and took up the mantle from Mac to continue championing this initiative with Corporate Strategy & Arvind – getting the ‘green light’ from Arvind in 4Q2018 to turn this into a product and take to market in 2019.
I believe the inception of this idea was in the summer of 2015 which came from Mac Devine and Egan Ford. Mac was IBM Fellow & VP, Cloud Innovation and our manager at the time reporting into Jim Comfort GM / CTO, IBM Cloud Infrastructure Services.
Egan (Ford) and I were partners on this project as I managed the original development team and he was the lead architect. We both reported to Mac (Devine) who recognized what was emerging in the market with IoT device leading to billions of things, which he called the ‘perfect digital storm’. Mac was a visionary and was also always working with IBM Strategy leading to some of IBM acquisitions. Egan was pivotal in finding existing IBMers and/or hiring the great talent that we brought into the original team also (e.g. David Booz, Bruce Potter, the Dye brothers, Isaac, Carl, and Varatep), which we added to others that were already in Mac’s team. I would love for both of them to be recognized.
See below the screenshot from the deck we presented to Jim Comfort, which shows the original team. I do not see Dinakaran Joseph, Michael Beisigel, Sivaram Gottimukkala, Varatep Buranintu, Khoa Huyhn, or Jeb Linton on your list. Also, the original team changed with some people leaving and new members added over time (e.g. Carl Girouard, Isaac Leonard, Henning Diedrich, Brad Clawsie, etc.). Those are the ones which come to mind on top of our original team noted above. I believe Dinakaran and Khoa are the only ones still at IBM today.
Growth and Transition: Open Horizon
Rob High and David Boloker put together a team to productize an edge computing solution.
At one point, they determined that contributing the source code, already released under an Apache 2.0 license, to the Linux Foundation. David spoke with the Eclipse Foundation leadership, but we ultimately went with LF, which was in the process of consolidating edge computing projects under the banner of a new umbrella group: LF Edge. IBM became one of the founders of LF Edge with Ryan Anderson serving as Governing Board member and Joe Pearson as Technical Advisory Council (TAC) member.
OH incubating under EdgeX Foundry
The team evaluated the best strategy to quickly build a community around the code and how to create an ecosystem. We determined that the quickest approach would be to build on top of an already-mature community like EdgeX Foundry. Dave Booz, Glen Darling, and Joe Pearson gave a demo and presentation proposing that OH incubate as a sub-project under EdgeX. But after the EdgeX team fully understood the value of OH’s solution, they counter-proposed that OH should become a standalone project and offered their assistance pursuing that goal.
OH becomes an LF Edge project
Became LF Edge project (Stage One) April 9, 2020
Promoted to Stage Two March 4, 2021
Apply for Stage Three … add a few more partners and non-IBM Maintainers.
Downstream products incorporating OH
IBM Edge Application Manager (IEAM)
Falcon Tactical Edge (FTE)
IBM Hybrid Cloud Mesh (HCM)
Maturity and beyond
OH micro-architecture support
The Agent software initially supported Devices with availability on x86 and arm, and eventually arm64. Thanks to Charisse Lu and her team, the Agent was ported to PPC and Z, while Intensivate and John Walicki assisted with the RISC-V port.
A Cluster Agent was created to deploy workloads to Kubernetes using the Operator SDK. The Cluster Agent supports x86, arm64, PPC, and Z. And there’s a feature request to add Helm 3 support.
Thanks to work from Nathan Phelps, we are in the process of being able to run the Exchange, and eventually the whole management hub, beyond just x86 to also include arm64, PPC, and Z as well.
OH mentorships
Open Horizon has been involved in five different mentorship programs over the years, involving at least 60 students.
OH Partners
March 28, 2022, TSC voted to make mimik Technologies a Partner based on their integration and code contribution
September 26, 2022, TSC voted offer Partner status to AccuKnox based on KubeArmor integration and bare Linux support
June 3, 2024, TSC voted to extend Partner status to Anylog based on EdgeLake collaboration and Realtime Workload Metrics feature request
September 22, 2025 TSC will vote on Mainsail Industries based on their embedding Open Horizon into Falcon Tactical Edge and marketing
OH TSC voted to fork Vault to create OpenBao October 23, 2023. It attracted five founding companies to become an LF Edge project a month later.
OH Services: Examples and Demo-in-a-Box
Open Horizon Services is a GitHub Organization created to house and manage example services as they grew beyond just “hello world” and shifted into useful examples, OSS project integration efforts (ORRA), initial implementations, and demonstrations of how to use commercial products. There are currently 44 repositories being maintained with more added as needed/requested.