LAS VEGAS — After a major restructuring and the sale of its device unit, Nokia is finally ready to grow again. Ricky Corker, executive VP of North America for Nokia Networks, outlined the company’s strategy this week at CTIA 2014.
“What we’ve done for the last two years here in North America is make sure that we know what the operators need and make sure our roadmaps are aligned to that,” said Corker. “Going back in time we were somewhat Euro-centric I’d say in our R&D processes.”
Corker said that Nokia is moving R&D processes to the cloud to create a “common network.” Streamlining and automating processes has been a major part of Nokia’s restructuring.
“We’ve automated a lot of things like global delivery centers. We remotely manage and download software to hundreds of thousands of base stations every night,” said Corker.
Open APIs
“We’re looking to open up our APIs. … The network infrastructure business is a little bit of a closed group, we don’t like to share very well, and we think we can break that model,” said Corker. “And it’s not just with partners, it could be our competitors. It could be ‘why not open up an interface and do something with one of our competitors if they have a better way of doing it and it’s a benefit for both of us?'” Corker noted that Nokia does not plan to share APIs “with the whole world,” but does want to explore a more open approach.
“We’re really trying to take a different approach to partnering,” he said. “Historically partnering typically meant “I’ll go buy a Juniper router and go and resell it.’ … Now there’s still some of that, but then when we do that reselling we actually verify the quality of the processes and the products in our system. … We will also embed other people’s technologies into our products, so taking best of breed and actually integrating that into our product portfolio.”
Services business
Nokia sees services as a major driver of future growth, particularly in North America. This year the company purchased SAC Wireless to expand its North American infrastructure services business. Corker said that Nokia’s services model has changed dramatically over the years.
“We had a very large services organization and as part of our restructuring we trimmed it down. We exited contracts, we exited countries in some places,” he said. “We’ve actually built now a very profitable services organization. It runs very well; that’s a real opportunity for us now to grow. We have a mode that works in services. We think we can scale that back up now in terms of growing and that’s a key driver for us, and again it very much linked in to our strategy in North America around the SAC acquisition.”
Corker said that Nokia now has the “leanest operating model in infrastructure sector.” The company has been profitable for the past eight quarters, despite declining revenue. During the second half of 2014, Nokia expects the top line to start to grow again.
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