Verizon took an investment stake in cloud-native core platform vendor Casa Systems, which further propels and diversifies the telecom giant’s wide-ranging mobile edge computing (MEC) plans.

The $40 million investment garners Verizon a 9.9% ownership stake in Andover, Maryland-based Casa Systems. The purchase price was at a 9% premium over Casa Systems’ closing price of $3.89 at the end of last week. That investment does not get Verizon a seat on Casa Systems board, though former Verizon executive Dan Mead is a member of that group.

Verizon also signed a six-year purchase agreement with Casa Systems. That deal could be valued at up to $140 million over the entire term, with $20 million in committed cash payments this year.

For that tidy sum, Casa Systems will provide licensing to its 5G core software and also development of that software to help power Verizon’s MEC offerings. Casa Systems CEO Jerry Guo said the company’s edge system can support most current and planned 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 during a conference call on the deal. He added that the same cloud-native platform can also support upgrading legacy 4G LTE cores.

For Verizon, the deal adds another vendor to its well-stacked quiver of MEC options.

The carrier is already working with all three major domestic hyperscalers on different MEC offerings. Verizon is using Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Wavelength and Outposts platforms to support its public edge service. It’s working with Microsoft Azure on a private 5G edge service. And it recently struck a deal to expand that reach with Google Cloud.

Guo noted during the conference call that his firm had traditionally competed against established network core vendors like Cisco, Nokia, Ericsson, and China-based providers. However, he said a more direct, modern competitor are the cloud players, with a specific callout of Microsoft Azure following the cloud giant’s acquisition of Affirmed Networks in 2020.

“We really don’t have a lot of players in this kind of very complex technology,” Guo said. ”Obviously, the best technology won and we are very excited we were chosen. We were validated that we have the necessary technology to enable Verizon to power their MEC deployment to go to the next step of cloud nativeness.”