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Nokia and VMware have announced an expanded partnership that includes the development of integrated solutions to support communications service providers’ (CSPs) drive for operational improvements and cost efficiency through 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 two companies will advance the interoperability between Nokia software applications and VMware’s Telco Cloud, including VMware vCloud NFV. Nokia and VMware will also increase their investments in a deeper partnership with technology collaboration and advanced research & development to develop integrated solutions. As a result, CSPs will be able to more easily meet their business and use case objectives, using VMware cloud infrastructure that is engineered to work together with Nokia virtualized and containerized network functions.

Nokia and VMware have been working together to create seamless cloud redundancy by running Nokia’s applications, such as Nokia Service Management Platform, on VMware’s Telco Cloud platform and VMware 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 Nokia VNFs and software applications on VMware vCloud NFV platform through a dedicated, on-site VMware Ready for NFV Certification Lab. The new lab includes performance characterization to enable CSPs to properly configure their technology environments for the best results. With the Certification Lab, Nokia and VMware will serve customers in an accelerated fashion, keeping pace with new features and releases and enabling better roadmap alignment between the two companies’ portfolios.

Several Nokia software applications, such as Nokia CloudBand Application Manager and Nokia Smart Plan Suite, along with virtual IMS, virtual packet core and session border controller are already certified for operations in VMware cloud environments. These and others can be found on VMware Solution Exchange.

Dr. Alex Jinsung Choi, Senior Vice President, Strategy & Technology Innovation, Deutsche Telekom, said: “We are pleased to see Nokia and VMware come closer together to enable a more seamless deployment of Nokia VNFs and CNFs on VMware’s Telco Cloud platform. We see great value in these two companies’ portfolios featuring greater interoperability and believe the contribution this expanded partnership will make to a viable ecosystem will help us accelerate our digital transformation.”

Shekar Ayyar, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Telco and Edge Cloud, VMware, said: “With the advent of 5G and edge computing, customers are adopting VMware’s container-ready Telco Cloud supported by innovative efforts like Project Maestro multi-domain orchestrator. We are delighted to partner with Nokia to enable faster deployment of Nokia virtual and containerized virtual functions on VMware cloud infrastructure, ultimately helping our customers prepare their telco cloud networks for the future.”

Bhaskar Gorti, President of Nokia Software, said: “In today’s digital era, communications service providers expect software solutions to be cloud-native and hardware-agnostic, with multi-vendor and multi-network capabilities built in. The expanded partnership we are announcing today gives Nokia and VMware greater scope and capacity to accelerate innovation and best anticipate and deliver against the expectations of our mutual customers.”