Nokia got into the telco software-as-a-service game back in November 2021 and since then has been steadily building out its product suite. But don’t be fooled into thinking it is done refining its offerings. Mark Bunn, Nokia’s SVP of SaaS Business Operations, told Silverlinings it has big plans to use automation to keep interest in cloud-native telco SaaS fresh.
What follows is a transcript of Silverlinings’ conversation with Bunn, edited for length and clarity.
Steve Saunders (SS), Silverlinings: What is your big focus at Nokia now?
Mark Bunn (MB): We see an opportunity to take the typical telecom managed service offering to a whole other level of automation. Regardless of what industry you're talking about, the enterprise customers are all about trying to improve their time to market. It's not enough to offer a customized version of a service and then just wrap up a managed service around it. We have to homogenize things so that we can deliver the service at scale in a way that's predictable, to start to create economies that benefit customers on the TCO side, as well as give them the ability to stay up to date on the latest software with regular upgrades, et cetera. That's what we're focused on.
SS: The key word which jumps out at me here is automation. How is Nokia differentiated in this area?
MB: Every vendor in the industry is attempting to build an end-to-end [automation] stack to help customers run their businesses better. My responsibility is to bring another layer of automation on top of that, to also improve the way that 'as-a-service' models get delivered.
As we moved into this cloud-native world, things didn't get easier like they were supposed to - they got more difficult. So customers have been coming back to the vendors and saying, 'hey, this is hard, can you run this for me?' What the IT industry has known for some time is, is that a lot of this 'as-a-service' stuff can be automated, so you don't need as many people to run it. It's really that simple, right? But there are some conditions.
One is that the customer has to be able to consume the service almost in a 'what you see is what you get' kind of way. There has to be some homogeneity to the way the service is delivered, so that you can give AT&T the same version as Verizon. But what we also know is that there's some specialization that every company is going to want. And Nokia is enabling them to do that by creating a network monetization platform through an API abstraction layer that enables customers to be able to build on top of our service.
SS: What sort of services have proven to be most popular with operators out of the gate?
MB: We started the SaaS journey with areas where we thought the operators would feel it were safe. I suspect our customers will [initially] use core network-as-a-service for some kind of adjacent business needs, like disaster recovery or network offload, or to spin up an MVNO. They won’t rip and replace their mission critical core network right away. It's too complicated.
Other services like analytics and cybersecurity, are getting a lot of traction immediately. Another key service right now is energy saving, which starts with the radio access network, but provides energy efficiency savings across the entire span of the network – even passive devices.
SS: Where do you think SaaS ends up? How far will operators go with this model, and when?
MB: What I've said a lot of times is it's not a question of ‘if,’ it's really a question of ‘when.’ I have a timeline in mind, but this industry is also very cautious, and it's regulated. So you have to work within those boundaries. We are seeing that analytics, cybersecurity, network management, those kinds of applications are ones that are acceptable for our customers right now. But there's tremendous interest in the core network [as-a-service] as well. We've just announced that service recently. It's coming soon, and we've got some [customers] that were pretty close to closing with on it.
SS: Nokia seems very focused on integration with the hyper-scalers. Is that accurate?
MB: I have good relationships with all of the hyperscalers. And we have workloads deployed on all the major ones. They have been very aggressive about build out and frankly they'll be able to cover the globe better than we could. So it makes sense to get into a relationship with them. And cloud-native means a lot of the software is cloud agnostic. Not all of it, but a lot. So that creates opportunities for us to be able to put workloads on the cloud service provider to which they are best suited, or where there is a cost optimization opportunity for me.
SS: But you've got hyperscalers out there with unlimited intellectual property and unlimited money. Does that worry you? In the long term isn't there a risk that they decide to just monopolize the whole market?
MB: The question is really ‘are hyperscalers a friend or a foe?’ The answer to that question is 'yes.' Will they try to take over telco, say? It's possible, but what I'm seeing through my relationships with them is that isn't really [their] desire. They're very cooperative with me. It's clearly coopetition but they would be very happy if Nokia were able to run a successful solution on top of their platforms. I think [SaaS] is a good demarcation for what we do well versus what they do.