BARCELONA – Media and analysts are accustomed to attending a pre-MWC event in Barcelona each year on Sunday before the official GSMA-sponsored event begins on Monday. And this was the case for 2023, as people gathered today at the Intercontinental Hotel to hear from Nokia’s top brass.
Two of Nokia’s announcements stood out. The first was that the company created a new logo because it wants the world to stop thinking of it as a consumer phone company. It wants to get the word out that it’s a business-to-business technology leader, ready to help all kinds of enterprises in every industry.
Nokia CEO Pekka Lundmark said today that a significant portion of the world still sees Nokia as a consumer brand. “We need to change that perception,” he said. “We are a B2B technology, innovation leader. It’s time to claim the space we already lead in.”
Nokia is an acknowledged leader in the telecom networking space, along with Ericsson and Huawei. But Lundmark wants to make inroads with other enterprises, as well. He said the company’s Enterprise business currently represents $2 billion annually, but “we want that to reach double digits as soon as possible.”
anyRAN
The second announcement of note today was Nokia’s launch of a product suite called anyRAN (not to be confused with also RAN).
anyRAN was introduced by Nokia’s President of Mobile Networks Tommi Uitto. He explained that anyRAN is designed to help mobile operators and enterprises extend their options for building and evolving their radio access networks. RAN software can run on any partner's cloud and server infrastructure in addition to Nokia’s AirScale base stations and Nokia AirFrame servers.
This approach allows customers to select a mix of cloud-based RAN solutions enabling a certain level of disaggregation at the cloud infrastructure layer and the server hardware layer.
The whole approach sounds similar to what Dell Technologies is doing with its infrastructure blocks model. Dell has partnered with a variety of vendors of cloud infrastructure, and it allows operators to select which of these vendors’ software they want pre-loaded onto Dell servers.
Similarly, today Nokia said it has signed go-to-market agreements with several cloud infrastructure and server providers. Uitto tossed out names such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google, along with hardware vendors such as HPE and Dell, although it’s not clear whether all these companies are yet official Nokia partners for anyRAN.
Uitto noted that server-based cloud RAN — which includes anyRAN — will have to co-exist with legacy purpose-built RAN in the short-to-medium term, which will require performance consistency and service continuity between the two.
Speaking on the sidelines of the event in Barcelona today, Uitto told Fierce Wireless that anyRAN “can be compliant with” the standards of the Open RAN Alliance. That’s up to the customer.