Ekinops has announced a new research collaboration with the French innovation center b<>com. The collaboration, which utilizes b<>com's private-public partnership model, will see the two organizations work together to develop technologies for private cloud infrastructures with use cases in eHealth, artificial intelligence and telecoms. Long time partners, Ekinops and b<>com have previously cooperated on optical transport solutions. This latest initiative will take a new approach to network access in a bid to evolve the field so that it may address a broader range of innovative, intelligent routing requirements resulting from the digitalization of cities, transportation, retail, health, energy distribution, and many others while continuing to operate within existing telecoms networks. The collaboration will focus on developing new generations of hardware and software platforms using a bare-metal "service containers" approach that optimizes resource allocation while meeting evolving connectivity demands in solutions that are robust, compact and easily integrated into any environment. It will also look to develop solutions that are flexible enough to host services that can support IoT or Edge Computing use cases, such as real-time pattern or object recognition, Cloud services while offering 4G, 5G or fiber access.