Telco giant Verizon has inked a deal to acquire a 9.9% stake in mobile infrastructure company Casa Systems for $40 million (£30.8m) as part of a multi-year purchase contract.
Whilst the investment does not give Verizon a direct seat on Casa Systems’ board of directors, former Verizon CEO Dan Mead is already a member.
As well as a stock buy-in, Verizon has also signed a six-year agreement that could be worth up to $140 million (£107.8m).
Under the terms of the agreement, Casa Systems will provide its 5G core network functions to Verizon to help it power the company’s public mobile edge compute (MEC) service offering.
Mobile edge computing moves computing resources onto cloud servers at the network edge so they are as close as possible to the site where data is generated.
According to Casa Systems CEO Jerry Guo, the company’s edge systems can support most current and upcoming 5G deployment plans.
“Casa supports multiple network deployment models, including standalone, non-standalone, and 4G traffic in control and user-plane separations mode,” Guo said.
For Verizon, the deal bolsters its already strong selection of MEC options. The carrier has deals with all of the Big Three hyperscalers – AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.
Its AWS partnership provides mobile edge services to 17 of the most populated metropolitan areas in the US, whilst it works with Google and Microsoft on a number of private enterprise and industry use cases.
Kyle Malady, president of global networks and technology at Verizon, said: “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.”
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