Finnish vendor Nokia announced the ‘Nokia Local 5G Technology Partnership’, a new strategic alliance to accelerate adoption of 5G-based enterprise industry solutions in Japan.
Members of the new alliance include Conexio, Hitachi Kokusai, NS (Nippon Steel) Solutions, Omron and Sharp, the vendor said.
Alliance partners will work in close collaboration to combine their collective industry, device, applications, cloud and 5G expertise to create new industry-specific solutions for use cases that include remote control, artificial intelligence, automation, robotics and automatic guided vehicles.
The vendor also highlighted that the alliance will enable participating companies to speed development and deployment of new, industry-based use cases with customers, integrating Nokia 5G private wireless at the concept and design phase.
Donny Janssens, Head of Nokia Enterprise Japan, said: “This new alliance boosts the local 5G private wireless ecosystem, bringing together many of the key players who are central to driving Industry 4.0 adoption in Japan. It recognizes that hyper-fast, highly reliable and secure 5G connectivity has a crucial role to play in enabling the digital transformation necessary for Industry 4.0 use cases.”
Industry solutions will be developed on Nokia’s industrial-grade 5G private wireless networking platforms. Nokia will provide both Nokia Digital Automation Cloud and Nokia Modular Private Wireless as part of solution development.
“When customers implement 5G private wireless with Nokia, they do so to deploy a solution that transforms how they operate, construct or manufacture. By building private wireless into the design phase, and creating field-tested industry solutions, customers can be assured that integration work is already done – both easing and speeding solution deployment,” Janssens added.
In December 2019, Nokia introduced a strategic partnership ecosystem to bring 5G and IoT to enterprises in Japan. Nokia had joined with five industrial companies in Japan in a bid to target various vertical sectors. These are NS Solutions for factory IoT, Marubeni for global IoT, Internet Initiative Japan for MVNOs, Equinix for multi-cloud and global data centres, and Hitachi Kokusai Electric for smart social infrastructure and smart cities with video solutions.
Spectrum designated for local 5G enterprise use in Japan was released at the end of 2019.
Nokia said it has over 220 large enterprise customers across industries worldwide, of which over 30 incorporate 5G.
Nokia also said it has deployed mission-critical networks to over 1,300 leading customers in the transport, energy, large enterprise, manufacturing, webscale, and public sector segments around the globe.
