Verizon’s nascent mobile edge computing (MEC) platform has reached a fork in the road. One path leads to a public cloud-based edge on Amazon Web Services (AWS), and the other leads to private edge services for enterprises on Microsoft Azure.

Verizon’s 5G Edge has been exclusively anchored to AWS since the companies partnered up in late 2019, but the operator today announced a separate effort that will allow enterprises to deploy MEC services riding on Azure. 

In this new private offering, the edge locations would be installed on the enterprise customers’ premises. “There would be an actual network, a small portable network that is obviously connected to the macro network from Verizon, that would be deployed on, say, a campus, and that would then also have an on-premise Azure solution integrated with our overall network,” Rima Qureshi, chief strategy officer at Verizon, explained in a phone interview.

Those on-campus deployments, jointly managed by Verizon and Microsoft, will include a small cell designed to connect to Verizon’s private network offering that incorporates and integrates with an Azure box that provides the edge compute service, she said.

“Depending on your use case, it would either run on the overall macro network or it would run on millimeter-wave [spectrum],” Qureshi said. Verizon last week expanded its 5G Ultra Wideband network to parts of 55 cities, and it activated a “nationwide” 5G network running on its low-band spectrum with the aid of dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS).

Verizon’s 5G Edge paired with AWS’ Wavelength edge compute service is now live in five U.S. cities, and the operator said it will reach another five markets before 2021.

Ice Mobility, a supply chain logistics company, is currently testing Verizon’s 5G Edge platform with Microsoft Azure, but Verizon hasn’t committed to a timeline for commercial availability of the new offering. Qureshi noted that Verizon, as its executives said previously at investor conferences, doesn’t expect to bank meaningful revenues from its edge service until 2022. 

The operator is also declining to reveal pricing details for its private MEC offering with Azure. Verizon is “still in the process of doing the use cases, but of course this will be value based” on the use cases and services it provides to each respective customer, Qureshi said.

“We believe multi-access edge or mobile edge compute will be a new source of use cases, as well as new sources of revenue for ourselves as well as the cloud providers,” she said.

This expansion to Azure for private MEC is an acknowledgment of Verizon’s strategy to assemble a multicloud environment. “Enterprises make their decisions based on who they would like to have as their cloud providers. So in the context of us working with all the major cloud providers, our objective is to offer that choice to the enterprises,” Qureshi said.

With respect to enterprises that might have an existing relationship with AWS or a strong preference to work with the No. 1 hyperscaler for a private MEC, she said Verizon believes in a multicloud environment and to “stay tuned.”

Shawn Hakl, a former longtime executive at Verizon that joined Microsoft as a partner earlier this year, framed this as an extension of Verizon’s ThingSpace IoT platform integration with Microsoft Azure IoT Central. “It’s sort of IoT on steroids to a large extent,” plus other services and capabilities, he said in a phone interview.

“Verizon has a deep roster of managed services around virtualized capabilities, so they understand that space very well. Coupled with our traditional cloud strength, and the fact that we both figured out how to talk to each other via APIs, give you kind of that complete digital experience and that ability to end-to-end orchestrate an answer,” Hakl said. 

The private edge service will provide Verizon’s enterprise customers with integrated access to Azure services and its corresponding development ecosystem in a flexible, secure, and resilient manner, according to Yousef Khalidi, corporate vice president of Azure for Operators at Microsoft. 

“The combination of Verizon and Microsoft’s capabilities will support customers with needs for ultra-low latency access to compute, highly localized processing and resilient solutions across industrial automation, intelligent video processing, mixed reality and digital twin scenarios, and localized [artificial intelligence] applications,” Khalidi wrote in response to questions.

Network slicing, software that allows operators to effectively carve out pieces of its network for private enterprise networks like these, doesn’t currently factor into Verizon’s offering with Microsoft, but the operator is considering that opportunity as standards are developed and software is ready to make that happen, according to Qureshi.