Nokia has expanded into the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) market with the launch of multiple cloud-delivered services.
The company announced three initial offerings designed to capture a SaaS addressable market that includes communications service providers (CSPs) and enterprises, estimated at $3.1 billion and growing at roughly 25–30% annually.
Raghav Sahgal, President of Cloud and Network Services at Nokia, said:
“The convergence of 5G, cloud-native software, and SaaS creates a fast-growing opportunity for Nokia.
With the groundwork we’ve already established, our SaaS delivery framework is in a strong competitive position. It combines rapid time to value with on-demand access to Nokia SaaS applications and a low total cost of ownership based on pay-as-you-go and pay-as-you-grow commercial models.
This will be a multi-year journey and we are pursuing it aggressively.”
The first service, Nokia Data Marketplace (NDM), has been available in other forms and is now being offered commercially through a SaaS framework to make it simpler and more secure for CSPs to share and access data.
Nokia says the SaaS-based NDM adds improved automation, greater efficiency and better scalability for CSPs and enterprises across multiple industries.
A new offering, NetGuard Cybersecurity Dome, focuses on security. It is built to protect the larger number of 5G access points by using automation to reduce dwell time for threats, minimize manual work, and accelerate incident response.
Another new service, Nokia Anomaly Detection, uses machine learning from Nokia Bell Labs to identify and remediate anomalies before they impact network customers.
Nokia plans to launch NetGuard Cybersecurity Dome and Nokia Anomaly Detection in early 2022.
Caroline Chappell, Research Director at Analysys Mason, commented:
“SaaS is the software consumption model of the future. While it is still emerging in the telco market, our research shows leading operators recognise its benefits and are looking for vendors to respond.
It’s encouraging to see a mainstream vendor like Nokia moving early into SaaS delivery. This positions Nokia to support operators that need to scale cloud-native technologies such as 5G, IoT, edge computing and AI.
CSPs must transform to capitalise on these technologies, and adopting SaaS delivery models is a critical part of that digital transformation.”
Nokia also stated it has additional SaaS services for CSPs in development and will share more details in early 2022.
(Photo by Ben on Unsplash)
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