Nokia strengthens portfolio focus in security, automation, and monetization

Nokia is strengthening its software portfolio in the areas of security, automation, and monetization, with AI binding the portfolio together, in order to better meet its customer needs and expand footprint in its addressable market.

The announcement reflects the continued evolution of Nokia’s software business and builds on the success of rearchitecting its applications to make them fully cloud-native and deployable in any cloud environment, edge, public or private; in addition to launching several Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) services to provide CSPs and enterprises with faster time-to-value in operating their telecom networks.

As part of its announcement, Nokia’s OSS, BSS, and security software applications will be unified under Nokia’s brand, AVA (Automation, Visualization, Analytics). AVA provides “Intelligence Everywhere” through AI, machine learning, no code configuration, open APIs, multi-cloud orchestration, and digital ecosystems.

Nokia is introducing AVA Open Analytics framework to help CSPs accelerate AI projects, in part by simplifying how data is stored and used. Currently data scientists can spend around 40 percent of their time* on data wrangling and repetitive tasks that should be automated, according to various industry estimates.

AVA Open Analytics framework will move customers from monolithic and centralized data “lakes” to a hybrid data mesh architecture that abstracts technical complexity and enables data scientists to focus instead on the needs of their data use cases. Nokia expects the framework to be fully commercially available in 2023.

Nokia is also introducing the IGNITE Digital Ecosystem to bring together customers and application partners to accelerate and commercialize innovation of security, automation, and monetization solutions.

Using Nokia’s ecosystem enablement platform (open-ecosystem.org), IGNITE streamlines collaboration through secure access to the resources needed to unlock value, including on-demand product sandboxes for experimentation and integration. More than 20 projects are already ongoing with customers and application providers, including the development of new machine-learning models, automation, and cybersecurity incident detection and response use cases.

Grant Lenahan, Principal Analyst at Appledore Research, said: “Nokia’s repositioning of its Business Applications under the AVA brand places artificial intelligence and machine learning as central pillars to Nokia’s software offering.”

Ahmad Latif Ali, Associate VP European Telecom Insights at IDC, said: “Telcos are searching for more intelligent ways to monetize their network data. As they do that, telcos must consider implementing next-generation AI, ML, and data governance capabilities. Nokia’s announcement today is an example of a vendor redoubling its efforts to drive further analytics innovation and 5G value for CSPs and enterprises.”

Hamdy Farid, Senior Vice President, Business Applications at Nokia, said: “By strengthening our analytics framework and unifying our portfolio under the AVA brand, we are reinforcing our commitment to provide deep intelligence across our security, automation and monetization solutions. We look forward to partnering with our CSP and enterprise customers along with application developers to drive further innovation and create 5G value.”