Nokia has sealed new partnerships with world’s biggest cloud providers – Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. In October last year, the Finnish telco giant had announced a move to the cloud, Google Clould, for the company’s IT infrastructure. 

 

The move is aimed at bringing their 5G and 4G services to major cloud providers. 

 

This collaboration will help Nokia offer Cloud RAN (Radio Access Network) and Open RAN technology solutions on AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.

 

Tommi Uitto, President of Mobile Networks at Nokia, said: "This is a critically important collaboration and the continuation of Nokia’s Cloud RAN leadership. At Nokia we are committed to supporting our customers and giving them the flexibility and elasticity they need on the network edge."

 

"We are building an ecosystem of public cloud partners that will ultimately support our customers and help them to build compelling 5G use cases," he added. 

 

On the Microsoft pact, Nokia said the focus will be on 4G and 5G private network solutions, as well as multi-access edge cloud with Azure’s Private Edge Zone. 

 

As per the deal, Microsoft will help develop new market-ready 4G and 5G private wireless use cases designed for enterprises. The collaboration will combine Nokia’s Cloud RAN (vRAN) technologies with Microsoft Azure cloud-based services and developer ecosystem to drive end-user functionality via new business cases. 

 

Yousef Khalidi, Corporate Vice President, Azure for Operators at Microsoft Corp, said: "We believe in the importance of an open and interoperable ecosystem of solutions on the Azure carrier grade platform. Our collaboration with Nokia across multiple potential use cases, based on specific customer demand, will provide operators with choices on how the best adopt cloud technology in concert with their 5G updates to drive new revenue streams, reduce cost and future proof their network investment."

 

The initiative supports Nokia’s strategy of partnering with best-in-class public cloud providers to drive end-user business outcomes essential for monetizing 4G/5G deployments, he added.

 

On the Google deal, Nokia said it is aimed at developing new, cloud-based 5G radio solutions. The two companies will collaborate on joint solutions combining Nokia’s Radio Access Network (RAN), Open RAN, Cloud RAN (vRAN) and edge cloud technologies, with Google’s edge computing platform and applications ecosystem. 

 

The collaboration will lead to the development of solutions and use cases to solve key 5G scenarios for businesses worldwide.

 

It is aimed at integrating the company’s 5G vDU (virtualized distributed unit) and 5G vCU (virtualized centralized unit) with Google’s edge computing platform, running on Anthos.” 

 

The collaboration is getting deeper with Nokia now offering Open RAN and Cloud RAN solutions on Google Cloud platform.

 

George Nazi, Global VP, Telco, Media & Entertainment Industry Solutions at Google Cloud, said: “In the 5G era, we’re committed to delivering solutions underpinned by world-class engineering that support our customers’ requirements and help them to take advantage of 5G.”

 

On the AWS pact, Nokia said it was for research and enable Cloud RAN (vRAN) and Open RAN technologies to support the development of new customer-focused 5G solutions. 

 

The collaboration, which will be conducted at Nokia’s facilities, aims to develop innovative proof of concepts (PoC) to explore and enable Cloud RAN and related technologies. 

 

Nokia is pursuing a strategy of collaborating with AWS to extend the reach of its Cloud RAN technologies in support of 5G deployments and the development of new use cases.

 

The initiative will see engineering teams from both companies research how the combination of Nokia’s RAN (Radio Access Network), Open RAN, Cloud RAN and edge solutions can operate seamlessly with AWS Outposts. 

 

This collaboration will enable communications service providers (CSPs) and enterprises with 5G connectivity to utilize AWS across the topology of the mobile network. Operators will be able to simplify the network virtualization and platform layers for the Core and RAN network functions by leveraging the agility and scalability of cloud, said Nokia in a statement. 

 

Nokia said it was pursuing a strategy of collaborating with AWS to extend the reach of its Cloud RAN technologies in support of 5G deployments and the development of new use cases.

 

Dave Brown, VP, Amazon EC2, AWS, said: "This collaboration with Nokia will extend the reach of our industry-leading cloud technology to support our Telco and enterprise customers. We look forward to working closely on this collaboration and offer multiple deployment choices for customers to build 5G Cloud RAN and Open RAN solutions."

 

"Our customers will benefit from different options to run 5G RAN using AWS Outposts with either Intel or ARM-based CPU choices, or third-party bare metal servers while using Amazon EKS and EKS Anywhere. This will solve for the challenge of CI/CD, automation, and network orchestration by using a common framework of tools across Core and RAN," he added.-TradeArabia News Service