Nokia, Dell to Boost Telecom Ties
The companies will use each other’s expertise as infrastructure provider and 5G platform
Dell and Nokia have announced that they would be extending their strategic partnership to use each other’s expertise and solutions to grab additional revenues from the telecom space. While Dell would provide infrastructure solutions to Nokia, the latter would share its expertise around private wireless connectivity.
This would enable both companies to expand open architectures in the telecom ecosystem and private 5G use cases among enterprises. Dell becomes the preferred infrastructure platform for Nokia’s AirFrame servers used for telecom cloud deployments that will help Nokia use Dell’s PowerEdge servers to run core, edge and radio access network (RAN) workloads.
Gaining from each other’s expertise
The Nokia Digital Automation Cloud (NDAC) private wireless solution will become Dell’s preferred private wireless platform for enterprise customers’ edge use cases. The companies will work together to integrate Nokia’s NDAC solution with Dell NativeEdge, the edge operations software platform, to provide a comprehensive, scalable solution for enterprises, the companies said in a joint statement.
While the move obviously adds to Delhi’s focus on the telecom space, which also saw the company join the govt-funded open RAN testing program led by AT&T and Verizon, Nokia can hope to benefit in its refocused operations that includes plans to reduce jobs to cut costs in the journey towards profitability.
Helps Nokia restructure itself better
The Finland-based Nokia had provided support and development of its container and cloud infrastructure operations to Red Hat last year which resulted in the latter absorbing Nokia’s Container Services and CloudBand Infrastructure Software into its container-focused OpenShift and virtual machine (VM)-focused OpenStack platforms.
Under this agreement, Nokia sourced out more than 350 members of its staff to Red Hat and made the company its primary cloud infrastructure platform for developing, testing and delivery of Nokia’s core network applications. Thereafter, it also sold its Device Management and Service Management platform businesses to Lumine Group for $200 million.
In fact, Nokia CEO Pekka Lundmark had told investors that the company’s private network business had been consistently delivering double-digit growth and that it ended 2023 with more than 710 private wireless customers that represented around a quarter of its overall enterprise sales bucket. This could get a further boost as Nokia’s digital automation cloud becomes the preferred wireless platform base for enterprise edge use cases for Dell.
In addition, the two companies would also work through Dell’s open telecom ecosystem lab for application testing and lifecycle management that includes certifying workloads on the Dell Telecom infrastructure blocks that support Nokia’s cloud offerings.
