By Sean Kinney, Editor in Chief

Verizon has taken a keen interest in vendor Casa Systems. In addition to striking a multi-year deal to supply 5G core network functions, Verizon is also investing approximately US$40 million into the US-based firm which equates to just under a 10 per cent ownership stake.

According to a statement from Casa Systems, the company will provide Verizon with 5G core functions to embolden its public mobile edge computing (MEC) offering. For its public MEC play, Verizon has partnered with AWS to offer edge compute services in 13 of the top 20 US metropolitan markets.

Verizon’s Kyle Malady, president of global networks and technology, said in a statement, ‘Casa Systems is an important member of our 5G and MEC ecosystem, providing flexible applications that will allow us to scale up for our customers as real-time solutions continue to grow. We have confidence in Casa as a cloud-native technology partner and look forward to joint innovation as we scale the power of 5G and MEC in the years to come.”

In terms of 5G monetization, Verizon sees MEC as a key growth vector. The company is all in on both public and private MEC; it’s part of a larger solution set combining the 5G network, its private networks business, IoT devices and platform, and managed services.

Casa Systems CEO Jerry Guo called the Verizon deal and investment “an important milestone” for both its technology and “the growth potential of our business. Our cloud-native approach is at the foundation of today’s agreement and represents an important pivot in the telecommunications industry.”

At Arden Media recent Telco Cloud Forum, Verizon’s Bill Stone discussed the operator’s network cloud strategy. He was clear that Big Red’s network will reside in a private cloud that Verizon fully controls.

In an interview with Tantra Analyst Founder Prakash Sangam, Stone said, “When it gets to the telco workloads, including what we’re talking about here today with vRAN and O-RAN, Verizon remains committed to disaggregating hardware and software and selecting the best available partner for each of the components. That’s our path forward. AT this point, our plan is to build, optimize and leverage our own telco-grade private cloud for both our core and RAN workloads. We’ll certainly continue to monitor other dynamics in the marketplace but I’ll just say, Verizon sees economic and operational benefits with our own Verizon cloud platform that will enable us to identify opportunities and scale fast.”