Kaloom today announced an expansion of its partnership with Red Hat to provide network operators with a more comprehensive approach to distributed edge computing. By integrating its Cloud Edge Fabric with Red Hat OpenShift, Kaloom aims to reduce the costs of edge infrastructure and further facilitate its use for 5G use cases.

The company argues that public cloud providers aren’t suited for low-latency applications, and it’s positioning itself as an alternative for 5G operators, emboldened by a new offering jointly developed with Red Hat. It supports a cloud-native function fabric architecture, services chaining that can improve networking efficiency in hybrid 4G and 5G networks, Kaloom’s 5G user plane function, Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

The new offering based on OpenShift provides a single platform and application lifecycle management for cloud native network functions (CNFs), virtual network functions (VNFs), and payload applications, explained CTO Suresh Krishnan. “These capabilities include a single point control for deployments, upgrades, rollbacks, security, and infrastructure management in the edge that encompasses compute, networking, and storage resources.”

Kaloom’s Cloud Edge Fabric with OpenShift, which will be commercially available before October, also allows customers to “run workloads on-premise over bare metal, containers, as well virtual machines (VMs), and provides integration into leading public cloud platforms such as AWS and Azure,” Krishnan added.

Legacy networks and data centers cannot meet demands for low latency, and that requires a fundamental shift in how edge computing is architected with a special emphasis on support for edge-native apps and delivering high performance at the lowest possible cost, he said.

“Kaloom is able to provide a combined and optimized platform that includes networking, mobile and fixed access termination,as well as an edge execution platform with an extremely small footprint,” Krishnan said. The software vendor claims this framework can deliver a tenfold reduction in total cost of ownership.

Kaloom is currently in various stages of the sales cycle with more than 40 network operators and service providers, according to Hitendra Sonny Soni, SVP of sales and marketing at the company. The company is also engaged in eight field trials and anticipates 10 more coming online before July.

Kaloom expects up to five of those trials to go into commercial deployment in the second half of this year.