The company believes it will be able to compete with the IT industry as well as with its traditional competitors, Ericsson and Huawei.
“Our current focus is telecoms operators. That’s our home ground,” said Deepak Harie, vice president for systems integration at Nokia’s global services business. “The skills we have are IT skills, but it’s not just the telco cloud. You have to have an idea of what enterprise requirements are.”
Nokia’s design centre is in Fleet, south-west of London, and it will work with a cloud delivery centre in Hungary, and a number of other global delivery centres.
The company already has €1 billion of business from outside the telecoms industry, said Igor Leprince, executive vice president of global services. This mainly comes from business it inherited when it bought Alcatel-Lucent earlier this year.
“Our first priority is our own customers,” said Leprince. “We want to be able to expand to our customers.” Outside telecoms, the company will focus on the public sector, health and “three or four key areas”.
The company is launching a unit called Prime Integration Services, under which it will act as the single point of contact, working in a development and operations based approach, to design and build open, standardised multi-vendor cloud networks tailored to meet operators’ specific needs.
“The level of complexity in the infrastructure layer is high,” said Harie, who pointed out that many companies want legacy technologies to be incorporated into new systems. “A lot have existing infrastructure and say ‘build around this’.”
He admitted that virtualisation and cloud “have been a slow burner” so far “but the reason we are taking the steps is we’re starting to see demand. It’s moved from talk and testing to companies starting to make choices.”
