Dell Technologies and Nokia form strategic partnership

Dell Technologies and Nokia have extended a strategic partnership to use each company’s expertise and industry-leading solutions, including infrastructure solutions from Dell and private wireless connectivity from Nokia, to advance open network architectures in the telecom ecosystem and private 5G use cases among businesses.

As part of the agreement, Nokia will adopt Dell as its preferred infrastructure partner for existing Nokia AirFrame customers, offering Dell’s technology as the infrastructure of choice for telecom cloud deployments. Nokia and Dell will help transition existing AirFrame customers over time to Dell’s broad infrastructure portfolio, including Dell PowerEdge servers, purpose built for modern telecom network workloads from core to edge to RAN.

The Nokia Digital Automation Cloud (NDAC) private wireless solution will become Dell’s preferred private wireless platform for enterprise customers’ edge use cases. The companies will work together to integrate Nokia’s NDAC solution with Dell NativeEdge, the edge operations software platform, to provide a comprehensive, scalable solution for enterprises.

“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,” said Dennis Hoffman, senior vice president and general manager, Telecom Systems Business, Dell Technologies. “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.”

“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, and Nokia’s vast experience in the design, deployment, and operation of high-performance public and private mobile networks will provide Dell’s customers with a comprehensive, scalable private wireless solution,” said Nishant Batra, chief strategy and technology officer, Nokia. “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.”

Building on existing research and development efforts around core network functions, the two companies will collaborate on platform and application testing and lifecycle management in the Dell Open Telecom Ecosystem Lab. Dell and Nokia plan to certify workloads on Dell Telecom Infrastructure Blocks that support Nokia Cloud offerings, while also continuing to collaborate on OEM engagements.