Nokia and AWS look to boost cloud for service providers

The cloud is everywhere today and, in many cases, the cloud means Amazon. Nokia is building on the company’s dominance in the cloud market by collaborating on a series of initiatives that will speed up the migration of service provider applications to the cloud, and leverage Nokia’s expertise to deliver a range of new 5G services.

The aim of the collaboration is to develop a range of products that will enable service providers to implement cloud strategies. The two companies are looking to use Nokia’s long-standing experience in wireless and the cloud expertise of AWS to improve connectivity to cloud infrastructure and to develop a set of integrated analytics and IoT offerings.

The two firms will collaborate using Nokia SD-WAN and its IMPACT IoT platform in combination with AWS Greengrass, machine learning and artificial intelligence services.

Four development areas

There are four specific areas where the two companies will work together. Firstly, in support of service providers who are looking to deploy AWS. The collaborators will particularly focus on Nuage Networks SD-WAN customers who use AWS, the aim being to offer these enterprises seamless AWS connectivity and secure branch computing.

AWS and Nokia are also hoping to develop a new set of 5G and edge cloud strategies, including new reference architectures that will help service providers and enterprise prepare for the emerging services. Finally, the two companies will work together to develop a set of IoT services using AWS Greengrass, Amazon Machine Learning, Nokia Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) and Nokia’s IMPACT platform.

The two companies explained the thinking behind the collaboration. Kathrin Buvac, Nokia's chief strategy officer, said: "The 4th Industrial Revolution requires a tighter integration between the IT and networking infrastructure worlds. Our collaboration with AWS will accelerate the migration of service provider applications to the cloud and enable us to forge new opportunities together by delivering on next-generation connectivity and cloud services.”

Terry Wise, global vice president of channels and alliances, Amazon Web Services, commented: "Service providers are accelerating their migration to AWS in order to drive innovation for their customers and deliver lower total cost of IT to their organizations. We are excited to partner with Nokia to accelerate cloud transformation for service providers, and enable the digital transformation journey for our mutual large enterprise customers."