Nokia has announced its foray into software as a service (SaaS) for communication service providers (CSPs).
With SaaS for CSPs, the firm aims to offer telecom operators a more flexible, customer-centric, and less expensive way to operate networks.
Nokia Data Marketplace (NDM), Nokia's SaaS offering launched earlier this year, is now commercially available through a SaaS framework, enabling CSPs to securely share and access data.
What’s more, NDM's new SaaS version offers enhanced productivity, efficiency, and scalability to a variety of industry verticals, including energy, transportation, and smart cities.
Additionally, Nokia’s NetGuard Cybersecurity Dome, slated to be released in 2022, will enable CSPs to monetize 5G security services. Nokia Anomaly Detection, a machine learning service focused on detecting and remediating network anomalies, will also be offered through a SaaS model by early 2022.
“Offering SaaS for CSPs is a natural evolution of everything as a service, a key element to Nokia’s overall strategy," the company explained.
"It reflects a culmination of steps Nokia has taken in recent years to enhance CSP network operations, including rearchitecting its software applications to make them fully cloud-native and deployable in any cloud environment, edge, public or private."
Between 2021 and 2025, Nokia expects to reach an expanded SaaS market, which is comprised of CSPs and enterprises, with a value of $3.1 billion and an annual growth rate of approximately 25-30%.
Nokia president of cloud and network services Raghav Sahgal said: “The convergence of 5G, cloud-native software and SaaS creates a great and fast-growing opportunity for Nokia. With the groundwork we’ve already been laying, our SaaS delivery framework is in a very strong competitive position.
"It enables a combination of rapid time to value with on-demand access for Nokia SaaS applications and low cost of ownership, based on a pay-as-you-go / pay-as-you-grow commercial model. This is a multi-year journey and we are going at it aggressively.”
