Dell Technologies and Nokia have announced the progression of their strategic partnership to utilise their collaborative expertise and leading solutions. This integrated approach will involve infrastructure solutions provided by Dell, paired with Nokia's private wireless connectivity in order to advance open network architectures across the telecom ecosystem and support private 5G use cases within businesses.
Nokia has selected Dell as its preferred infrastructure partner for its existing Nokia AirFrame customers with a key focus on transitioning these customers over time to Dell's extensive infrastructure portfolio. This portfolio includes the likes of Dell PowerEdge servers which have been purpose-built for modern telecom network workloads. This strategic partnership means that Dell's technology will become the infrastructure of choice for telecom cloud deployments.
The Nokia Digital Automation Cloud (NDAC) private wireless solution will be introduced as Dell's preferred private wireless platform for enterprise customers’ edge use cases. The two companies are set to work closely together to integrate Nokia's NDAC solution with Dell NativeEdge which is the edge operations software platform. This integration will result in a comprehensive, scalable solution for corporate entities.
Dennis Hoffman, senior vice president and general manager, Telecom Systems Business, Dell Technologies, said "Through our collaboration, Nokia and Dell Technologies will harness each company’s expertise and expanded distribution to simply and quickly scale modern telecom networks and private 5G use cases. With our decades of digital transformation experience, we're ready to work together with Nokia's customers to continue their network cloud transformation journey on the industry's top selling compute platform."
Nishant Batra, chief strategy and technology officer at Nokia, stated, "This strategic partnership will make both companies more flexible and able to better address future customer needs. Dell's digital transformation expertise and global scale, services and support will provide a seamless transition option for Nokia AirFrame customers. Equally, Nokia's vast experience in the design, deployment, and operation of high-performance public and private mobile networks will offer Dell's customers with a comprehensive, scalable private wireless solution."
Batra added, "In line with our technology strategy, our continued collaboration with Dell will help address the future needs of our customers brought on by the increasing demands on networks and provide solutions to help communications service providers scale modern networks to the cloud."
Further extending their joint research, development and lifecycle management efforts in the Dell Open Telecom Ecosystem Lab, both companies are planning to continue platform and application testing. Future plans also include Dell and Nokia certifying workloads on Dell Telecom Infrastructure Blocks that support Nokia Cloud offerings, as well as maintaining OEM engagements.