Nokia and Google Cloud sign strategic collaboration

Author: Carly Weller

Nokia and Google Cloud have announced a five-year strategic collaboration that will see Nokia migrate its on-premise IT infrastructure onto Google Cloud. Nokia will migrate its data centres and servers around the world, as well as various software applications, onto Google Cloud infrastructure.

The deal reflects Nokia’s important operational shift to a cloud-first IT strategy and its aggressive efforts to strengthen and transform its digital operations globally in order to expand collaboration and innovation capabilities of Nokia employees and to enhance its delivery to customers.

The agreement is expected to drive meaningful operational efficiencies and cost savings over time due to a reduction in real estate footprint, hardware energy consumption, and hardware capacity purchasing needs.

Under the deal, Nokia will use a suite of Google Cloud products and professional services. Nokia and Google Cloud have worked together for the past few months to design a highly customised migration approach that will allow Nokia to exit its IT data centres on a rapid schedule, while minimising business impact and setting a strong foundation for the future. Google Cloud will deploy strategic systems integrators, solutions specialists, and engineers to ensure a stable migration.

Google Cloud’s extensive infrastructure-as-a-service portfolio of compute, networking, and storage solutions offers agility, rapid development, and availability. These capabilities will accelerate cost optimisation, efficiency, and operational reliability for Nokia.

Nokia’s infrastructure and applications will run in the public cloud or in a Software-as-a-Service model going forward. Deployment of the migration has started and is expected to extend over an 18- to 24-month period.

Ravi Parmasad, VP Global IT Infrastructure at Nokia, says, “Nokia is on a digital transformation path that is about fundamentally changing how we operate and do business. This is crucial for how our employees collaborate so that we continue to raise the bar on meeting the needs of our customers. We are very pleased that Google Cloud, with its engineering and operational excellence, is joining our transformation work to help us deliver on the many goals we have set. Given Nokia’s digital ambitions and plans, this is an ideal time for Nokia to be taking this step with Google Cloud to accelerate our efforts; and doing all of this in a secure and scalable way.”