LONDON (Reuters) – Nokia and Dell Technologies have agreed to a partnership to help deploy so-called private 5G networks and adapt networks to the cloud, they said in a joint statement on Thursday. Private 5G networks tend to be owned, operated, or leased by individual organizations. Customers of Nokia AirFrame, the communications equipment maker’s cloud-centric data center business, will eventually migrate to Dell’s PowerEdge servers “built specifically for modern communications network workloads,” they said. Meanwhile, Nokia’s Digital Automation Cloud (NDAC) will be Dell’s preferred private wireless platform to meet specific enterprise customer requirements. The companies will expand their existing partnership and work to integrate NDAC and Dell’s NativeEdge software platform to “advance open network architectures and enterprise-to-enterprise private 5G use cases in the communications ecosystem.” Open network architecture is an approach in computing and communications that allows a product, such as a software program, to be compatible with another product, such as a mobile phone, even though it is manufactured by a different vendor. Nishant Batra, Chief Strategy and Technology Officer, Nokia, said, “Our continued collaboration with Dell will help communications service providers meet the future needs of their customers driven by increased network demands and enable communications service providers to modernize their networks. We help provide solutions that help customers extend their business to the cloud.” The companies will also continue joint research and development efforts, including platform and application testing at the Dell Open Telecom Ecosystem Lab.
(Reporting by Olivier Sorgot; Editing by Mark Potter)
