Finnish telecoms vendor Nokia has announced two new partnerships – with Dell Technologies and Microsoft – as it seeks to drive 5G adoption in the enterprise sector.
In the first of two announcements, Nokia said it has extended its partnership with Dell in an agreement that will see the Finnish firm’s wireless solution become Dell’s preferred private 5G network platform for enterprise customers.
Private 5G allows organisations to deploy and manage their own private mobile network. It is often seen in industry 4.0 environments such as factories, and shipping ports, but has also been used by the US Navy, and French football clubs.
The agreement will also see Nokia adopt Dell’s cloud deployments, transitioning customers over to Dell’s infrastructure built for telecom network workloads.
“Through our collaboration, Nokia and Dell Technologies will harness each company’s expertise and expanded distribution to simply and quickly scale modern telecom networks and private 5G use cases,” said Dennis Hoffman, senior vice president and general manager, Telecoms Systems Business, Dell Technologies.
“Our continued collaboration with Dell will help address the future needs of our customers brought on by the increasing demands on network and provide solutions to help communications service providers scale modern networks to the cloud,” adds Nishant Batra, chief strategy and technology officer at Network.
The two companies will also build on existing research and development efforts, including platform and application testing in the Dell Open Telecom Ecosystem Lab.
Nokia, A1 and Microsoft announces “industry’s first” 5G edge cloud network slicing solution for enterprises
The announcement arrives in the same week as Nokia, Austrian telco A1, and Microsoft revealed a joint deployment of 5G edge cloud network slicing solution for enterprises.
Network slicing can be tailored to support specific customer use cases and applications based on network traffic, security, and performance. It can be used across several enterprises and industries including retail, media, utilities, healthcare, and transportation.
After a trial, Nokia’s 5G edge slicing solution enabled A1 to isolate its public internet and enterprise traffic while keeping business traffic local.
The trial was executed with Azure, which supports enterprise private and public applications at operator and enterprise edge.
“This collaboration opens up new business opportunities and demonstrates our commitment to delivering innovative services for our enterprise customers, as well as realising the full potential of 5G technology,” says CEO of A1, Marcus Grausam.
“This deployment with our partners, A1 and Microsoft, is further demonstrating Nokia’s leadership in network slicing as well as our mission to help our customers unlock further 5G monetisation opportunities,” adds president of mobile networks at Nokia, Tommi Uitto.
Almost exactly a year ago, Nokia announced an extended partnership with infotech organisation Kyndryl with plans to deploy further private 5G connectivity and industry 4.0 solutions.
