Nokia partners with AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure to deliver cloud-based 5G solutions

In a series of press releases today, Nokia announced new partnerships with world’s biggest cloud providers – Amazon’s AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

In October last year, Nokia announced a move to the cloud, Google Clould, for the company’s IT infrastructure. Today, the Finns are bringing their 5G and 4G services to major cloud providers. Nokia will offer Cloud RAN (Radio Access Network) and Open RAN technology solutions on AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. All three press releases are fairly similar, so it is fair to assume that all three cloud providers will have similar offerings.

In the Microsoft Azure press release, Nokia mentions 4G and 5G private network solutions, as well as multi-access edge cloud with Azure’s Private Edge Zone. In the Google PR, Nokia informs us about the progress in integrating the “Nokia’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.

With Amazon, at the moment the biggest cloud provider on the market, Nokia will be offering Cloud RAN and Open RAN technology to develop new customer-focused 5G use cases. “This collaboration will allow Nokia to leverage AWS services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), AWS Outposts, AWS Local Zones, and other related services for automating network functionality, or end customer application deployment, scaling, and management,” says the press release.

It’s great to see Nokia broadening the reach of their services by utilizing the major cloud providers. The truth that a lot of “software” companies already started competing in the “network software” market (where Nokia has a thin lead currently), so it makes sense to Nokia to offer telecoms and other companies that currency use the services of popular cloud providers to move (some of) their network related stuff to cloud as well.