Nokia is shifting all of its on-premises IT infrastructure onto Google Cloud, including its data centers, servers and software applications.
Nokia said the five-year "strategic collaboration"—financial terms weren't disclosed—reflected a shift towards a "cloud-first IT strategy" as part of its digital transformation efforts. Nokia said it expects working with Google Cloud would lead to "meaningful operational costs savings and efficiencies."
The partnership is also expected to reduce Nokia's real estate footprint, lower its hardware energy consumption and lower its hardware capacity purchasing needs.
It could also lead to another reduction in Nokia's headcount. Last year, Nokia eliminated 5,000 jobs and will eliminate 1,000 positions this year. On the plus side, Nokia, which is looking to cut costs by $587 million this year, announced earlier this month that it now has 100 commercial 5G deals in place.
Nokia will use a range of Google Cloud products and professional services. Nokia and Google Cloud put their heads together over the past few months to design a customized migration approach that will allow Nokia to exit its IT data centers on a rapid schedule, "while minimizing business impact and setting a strong foundation for the future." Google Cloud will use systems integrators, solutions specialists and engineers to ease the migration issues.
"We look forward to bringing our leading networking, data analytics, AI/ML, and other technologies to empower Nokia to deliver a cloud-first strategy and better serve its customers," said Google Cloud President Rob Enslin, in a statement. "We are excited to help Nokia revamp its IT infrastructure with our backbone network and our approach to data security, using advanced software-defined networking."
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Telefónica is also using Google Cloud's services to boost its own digital capabilities, and internal digital transformation, across machine learning, artificial intelligence, data analytics and application development.