French Engineering firm Altran, part of the Capgemini Group, and London-based cloud infrastructure start-up Ori Industries are collaborating on a developer-centric initiative to help promote federated multi-access edge computing.

Altran and Ori are working with mobile network operators on a mobility-friendly approach to edge computing. The aim is that developers will be better able to deploy applications globally, and operators will be able to launch and monetise industry use cases that are interoperable across different networks and geographies.

Both Altran and Ori have a focus on Industrial IoT and M2M manufacturing applications.

Federated multi-access edge computing (MEC) establishes separate channels that can interconnect MEC systems between each carrier so that service providers can provide the same 5G services regardless of region or carrier. Application developers will be able to improve development efficiency by reducing the process for optimising the same services to each carrier’s 5G MEC system.

“We are excited to team with Ori and bring our deep industry expertise in the communications, automotive, healthcare and aerospace sectors to address the full spectrum of requirements from private and public networking, cloud infrastructure and edge application development,” said Shamik Mishra, vice president of Research and Innovation at Altran.

“Our solution delivers innovation at the network edge on a global scale,” said Mahdi Yahya, chief executive officer at Ori Industries, which has developed the OGE edge cloud computing platform. “By combining Altran’s reach and system integration capabilities across multiple industries and networks with our own expertise and products in cloud-native edge computing, we are offering the developer community the ability to build once and deploy globally over unchartered infrastructure, ushering in the era of next-generation cloud computing.”

As with most other technology transitions, edge computing will depend on the ecosystem to meet developer expectations by simplifying application development and delivery from DevOps, mobile operator support and industry systems integration. The Altran-Ori collaboration will explore the best practices and methodologies to deploy industrial applications on 4G/5G private and campus networks.

Fueled by multi-access edge deployments across a number of industries, total annual spend on mobile edge computing is projected to reach over $11 billion by 2024, up from an estimated $1.3 billion last year, according to Juniper Research.