Nokia has entered the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) market with the announcement of multiple services.
A trio of services have been announced with the aim of capitalising on a SaaS addressable market – comprising CSPs and enterprises – with a value of $3.1 billion and an annual growth rate of approximately 25-30 percent.
Raghav Sahgal, President of Cloud and Network Services at Nokia, said:
“The convergence of 5G, cloud native software, and SaaS creates a great and fast-growing opportunity for Nokia.
With the groundwork we’ve already been laying, our SaaS delivery framework is in a very strong competitive position. It enables a combination of rapid time to value with on-demand access for Nokia SaaS applications and low cost of ownership, based on a pay-as-you-go / pay-as-you-grow commercial model.
This is a multi-year journey and we are going at it aggressively.”
The first service, Nokia Data Marketplace (NDM), technically already exists. However, with today’s announcement, NDM is now becoming commercially available through a SaaS framework to give CSPs an easy and secure way to share and access data.
Nokia claims the new SaaS version of NDM offers enhanced automation, efficiency and scalability to CSPs and enterprises in a variety of industry verticals.
The first brand new offering is NetGuard Cybersecurity Dome which, as the name suggests, is a security solution. The service is specifically targeted at securing 5G’s increased number of access points using automation to shrink threat dwell time, reduce manual tasks, and shorten response time.
Next on Nokia’s SaaS menu is Nokia Anomaly Detection. The machine learning-powered service is based on technology from Nokia Bell Labs and aims to find and remediate anomalies before they affect network customers.
Both NetGuard Security Dome and Nokia Anomaly Detection are due to be launched in early 2022.
Caroline Chappell, Research Director at Analysys Mason, commented:
“SaaS is the software consumption model of the future. It is nascent in the telco market today but our research shows that leading operators understand its benefits and are waiting for vendors to respond.
It is good to see a mainstream vendor like Nokia making an early move into SaaS-based delivery. This will position Nokia well to serve operators that need to accelerate the adoption of new cloud-based technologies at scale, such as 5G, IoT, edge computing, and AI.
CSPs must transform themselves to capitalise on these technologies, and the switch to SaaS delivery models is a critical component of their digital transformation strategies.”
Nokia says that it has other SaaS for CSP services in the pipeline that it will announce in early 2022.
Looking to revamp your digital transformation strategy? Learn more about the Digital Transformation Week event taking place in Amsterdam on 23-24 November 2021 and discover key strategies for making your digital efforts a success.
