Packet deployed its bare-metal edge cloud at the EdgeConneX data center in Detroit in a move that allows local enterprises — specifically the automotive sector and suppliers — to connect to Sprint’s Curiosity IoT platform.

“We’re delivering, I believe, the first bare-metal cloud platform as well as the first IoT platform, wireless connectivity platform, built for applications in Detroit,” said Zachary Smith, Packet co-founder and CEO.

Sprint is a Packet customer, and it built its Curiosity IoT network as an entirely separate entity from its core network on top of Packet’s bare-metal cloud. Its Curiosity IoT platform combines this distributed IoT network with an integrated IoT operating system. “It’s a network built for software that is also fully virtualized itself,” Smith said.

Providing network edge computing capabilities becomes increasingly important in a market like Detroit where new applications and workloads such as IoT and autonomous vehicles are emerging, and they require ultra-low latency and very close compute resources.

“This is really emblematic of the trends you are seeing at the edge, be it autonomous vehicles or IoT or gaming or over-the-top content,” said Phillip Marangella, chief marketing officer at EdgeConneX. “So much of the data gravity is shifting that has always been centralized, and the internet just doesn’t work in Detroit if you are supporting these workloads and applications out of those core [cloud data center] markets.”

EdgeConneX has 40 data centers in 33 markets globally. Its edge data centers are typically located in tier two or tier three markets.

While Detroit isn’t too far from Chicago, which is a tier one data center market, it’s not close enough to provide the needed sub-20 millisecond latency for autonomous cars as well as storage and processing of high bandwidth content in close proximity to the device edge, Marangella added. “It demonstrates the importance of that proximity to that ecosystem brought locally to a market like Detroit where a big market segment like automotive will need that very close, very integrated ecosystem,” he said. “You can’t have that back and forth between a centralized cloud, and this is why having a local center is so important.”

Additionally, the combination of the EdgeConneX global footprint with Packet’s bare-metal cloud will enable other industries in other locations to benefit from new edge computing-enabled use cases, the partners say.

“We’ve enabled the EdgeConneX platform and Packet’s bare-metal platform to work really well together, and we can take it wherever we need to go,” Smith said. “We’re interested in all the different locations within the EdgeConneX platform, which are available not only to us but for all of our customers. We’re already looking at several different sites here in North America, Europe, South America. This is just the start of the customers who are going to come around the honeypot, and they all need to interconnect.”