Three’s A Cloud: Nokia Allies With Hyperscaler Triumvirate To Accelerate Enterprise 5G
By Sean Kinney, Editor in Chief
In October last year, Nokia CEO Pekka Lundmark, in addition to sharing Q3 financials and giving a first-look at an organizational overhaul, gave a fairly detailed breakdown of where the company and its customers are going in regard to 5G. In a review of the transcript of his commentary, a focus on open and cloud RAN stands out which adds important context to a trio of announcements from Nokia this morning around partnerships with hyperscalers Google Cloud, AWS and Microsoft Azure that speak to the role of distributed cloud in delivering 5G solutions to enterprise verticals.
Out of 5G, enterprises are looking to use connectivity, compute and data derived from IoT sensors to automate processes, save money and improve outcomes. As far as how hyperscalers fit in, it’s about flexible compute that can handle high capacity, real-time data flows joined with 5G in an IT-like manner that’s familiar to the CIO’s office.
As Lundmark said last year: “The shift from static ownership to instant access the move of web-scale companies into the edge cloud and Nokia’s own move into cloud-native functionality that can be deployed on cloud infrastructure from any major cloud provider…We see value migrating from integrated systems to cloud-native software systems…We’re well-positioned to maintain strong momentum in this [enterprise]business, as digitization and automation in industrial segments drive increased investments in technologies, such as private wireless and cloud solutions. Third, we see a longer-term opportunity to lead the network as a service business models for operators, enterprises and web-scale customers. This change offers a broad opportunity for Nokia to provide a trusted software-led and cloud-based network capability that can be rapidly integrated, deployed and self managed as a complete service.”
Lundmark called his shot as it were given that today (March 15), Nokia announced partnerships with three of the biggest hyperscalers in the game, Google Cloud, AWS and Microsoft Azure, companies that are also independently investing in their telco businesses.
