Nokia has announced an alliance with Indian multinational Infosys to develop industrial IoT (IIoT) solutions, and a deal with network operator China Unicom to deploy a private LTE set-up for BMW in China.
The Infosys collaboration and China Unicom contract are the latest missives from the Finnish vendor in support of its expansion beyond straight telecoms provision. They come as Nokia also revealed a reorganised IIoT portfolio and a new business division, under the ‘Future X for industries’ brand.
The arrangement with Infosys will see the the pair pool their resources to accelerate the digital transformation of the transportation, energy, manufacturing, media and entertainment, and education markets. They will focus on the industrial application of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and lean management, they said.
Nokia will contribute its connectivity products and services; Infosys will supply platform solutions and engineering expertise. Their first work will be to develop digital asset management solutions for the energy, transportation and manufacturing sectors.
Collaboration on applications for the communications, media and entertainment markets, and education sectors will follow. Solutions for the latter will seek to leverage wireless broadband, cloud and IoT technologies to support smart campus and smart classroom environments.
Anand Swaminathan, senior vice president and global industry leader at Infosys, said: “The rapidly changing technology landscape is challenging organisations to transform their business and operating models. Our strategic alliance with Nokia aims at resolving some of these challenges to help customers stay competitive… [and] to operate as digital enterprises in a hyper connected economy.”
Laurent Le Gourrierec, head of strategic partnerships at Nokia, said: “The unique strengths of our two companies put us in an ideal position to take advantage of the wave of digital transformation that is sweeping the manufacturing, energy and transportation markets and other major industries.”
Meanwhile, Nokia and China Unicom will deploy a private LTE network for smart manufacturing services at a new BMW plant in the city of Shenyang in China’s Liaoning province.
The work will combine Nokia’s virtualised multi-access edge computing (MEC) and China Unicom’s 4G LTE network to process data closer to where it is being used, and secure low-latency communications for applications such as object tracking, video surveillance, and analytics.
China Unicom is running the Nokia virtualised MEC solution over its LTE network, completed in October.
The private LTE network will support secure connectivity for wireless video monitoring, production line inspection, indoor navigation, and industrial robots.
Gao Bo, head of China Unicom’s customer team at Nokia Shanghai Bell, said: “Being a software only solution, the Nokia vMEC can be integrated easily into existing enterprise IT infrastructure to enhance business-critical processes and deliver new operational efficiency.”
