By James Blackman
Nokia has teamed up with professional services consultancy Ernst & Young (EY) in Finland to help enterprises and mobile operators ”unleash the business potential” of ‘private wireless’ solutions, the umbrella term used by Nokia to capture a range of industrial networking technologies, but with focus particularly on private versions of the LTE and 5G families of cellular tech.
The pair said the alliance is being rolled-out to other EY member firms across the globe, beyond the original Finnish start-point. They said they will look to help enterprises “maintain resiliency beyond the Covid-19 pandemic” with an array of cellular-based Industry 4.0 technologies. They are also focused on cybersecurity, alongside sundry IoT-based sensing and analytics-based sense-making technologies, and the longer-game of IT/OT integration.
A key part of the announcement is also around “digital transformation for communication service providers”. The pair have combined, through EY’s US office, with “vertically integrated” innovation firm Nottingham Spirk to open a new ‘innovation hub’ to showcase new industrial automation capabilities, put back from the spring to the summer. The site uses Nokia’s ‘digital automation cloud’ product, an as-a-service edge networking solution for plug-and-play local-area private LTE and 5G deployments.
The alliance focuses on three key offerings, by all accounts: fuelling digital change in manufacturing, energy, and operations across industries, including for governments and cities; building cybersecurity and digital trust by protecting and managing challenges brought by IoT and IT/OT crossover; and helping telcos, specifically, to capture and monetize 5G business enterprise opportunities.
The new EY-Nottingham Spirk Innovation Hub in Cleveland, Ohio, will combine EY’s digital, manufacturing and ‘EY wavespace’ capabilities with Nottingham Spirk’s design and product development offerings. The site will showcase how robotics and autonomous machines can leverage 5G, they said. EY said private 5G and edge compute represent “primary enabler(s)” for “connecting people, machines, devices, and business processes”. Nokia’s involvement in the facility is new
Co-president and co-founder at Nottingham Spirk, John Nottingham said: “Nokia’s contribution to the EY-Nottingham Spirk Innovation Hub will provide hands-on demonstrations for visitors to experience the power and possibilities of a connected 5G network.”
EY said demand for connectivity is peaking with the trend for remote working, alongside pickup of industrial IoT technologies. Research by the firm says 69 per cent of organizations are currently investing or planning to invest in 5G. The work with Nokia is geared to “address the management and security challenges relating to these emerging technologies, and the expansive data they generate,” it said.
Global lead for technology and telecoms at EY, Greg Cudahy said: “The impact of 5G across industries is a growing priority for EY clients undergoing digital and business transformation, as new use cases become a critical focus looking beyond this period of crisis… The alliance with Nokia helps deliver end-to-end solutions to address clients’ most pressing challenges as they respond to dramatic shifts in market dynamics and strive to accelerate growth and productivity gains.” President of Nokia’s cloud and network services group, Raghav Sahgal said: “Together, we will bring leading, high-performance, and secure network solutions for operators and industrial players around the world, and the experience required to develop innovative business models and 5G use-cases for enterprises. This means an acceleration of the digital transformation journey for customers as they seek to reinvent themselves in a post-pandemic world.”
