Nokia and VMware Expand Partnership

Nokia and VMware announced an expanded partnership that includes the development of integrated solutions for support communications service providers’ (CSPs) in large-scale, multi-cloud operations.

After years of working with virtual or cloud-based network functions in limited production deployments, CSPs need to build out these functions at scale to handle the increasing use of new data-intensive applications for tomorrow’s 5G and edge computing use cases. Success of this strategy is dependent on seamless interoperability and efficient operations of cloud-based network functions.

VMware and Nokia have a broad mutual customer base globally, across both companies’ portfolios. Through the expanded partnership announced today, the companies will advance the interoperability between Nokia software applications and VMware’s Telco Cloud, including vCloud NFV. They will also increase their investments in a deeper partnership with technology collaboration and advanced research & development to develop integrated solutions.

Nokia and VMware have been working together to create seamless cloud redundancy by running Nokia’s applications, such as Service Management Platform, on VMware’s Telco Cloud platform and HCX, an application mobility platform designed for simplifying application migration, workload rebalancing, and optimized disaster recovery across data centers and clouds. This will enable customers to embrace a multi-cloud strategy to unify network and IT environments and connect them to private enterprise clouds, edge clouds, and public clouds.

Nokia will continue to focus on the technical certification of VNFs and software applications on VMware vCloud NFV platform. The new lab includes performance characterization to enable CSPs to properly configure their technology environments for the best results. With the Certification Lab, the companies will serve customers in an accelerated fashion, keeping pace with new features and releases and enabling better roadmap alignment between the two companies’ portfolios.