Nokia signs five-year deal with Google Cloud to support its datacentre shutdown plans

Nokia is preparing to shutter its datacentres around the world and move its on-premise IT infrastructure and applications estate into the Google Cloud to improve the efficiency of its operations.

The multinational telecommunications firm has signed a five-year strategic collaboration with Google, as part of a wider cloud-first push by Nokia designed to help it cut costs and accelerate its global digital transformation efforts.

The company is specifically looking to the cloud to help expand its capacity for collaboration and innovation, while enabling it to save money by curtaining the size of its in-house datacentre estate, and, in turn, reduce its IT hardware spend and the amount it spends on powering its server farms.

“Nokia is on a digital transformation path that is about fundamentally changing how we operate and do business,” said Ravi Parmasad, vice-president of global IT infrastructure at Nokia. “This is crucial for how our employees collaborate so that we continue to raise the bar on meeting the needs of our customers.

“We are very pleased that Google Cloud, with its engineering and operational excellence, is joining our transformation work to help us deliver on the many goals we have set.

“Given Nokia’s digital ambitions and plans, this is an ideal time for Nokia to be taking this step with Google Cloud to accelerate our efforts, and doing all of this in a secure and scalable way.” 

In a statement, the two companies confirmed they have spent the past few months designing a “highly customised migration” path that will pave the way for Nokia to rapidly exit its datacentres with “minimal business impact”.

Google has committed to providing support, in the form of systems integrators and engineers to assist with the migration, while Nokia have access to the search giant’s full infrastructure as a service (IaaS) portfolio of products to support its shift from on-premise to the public cloud.

“Nokia’s infrastructure and applications will run in the public cloud or in a software as a service model going forward. Deployment of the migration has started and is expected to extend over an 18- to 24-month period,” the company statement confirmed.

Rob Enslin, president of Google Cloud, said the modernisation of Nokia’s IT infrastructure stack will see it draw on the full breadth of its public cloud portfolio of tools and technologies.

“We look forward to bringing our leading networking, data analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning and other technologies to empower Nokia to deliver a cloud-first strategy and better serve its customers,” he said.

“We are excited to help Nokia revamp its IT infrastructure with our backbone network and our approach to data security, using advanced software-defined networking. We look forward to providing the full menu of our capabilities to help Nokia deliver on its cloud-first strategy and reach its performance requirements.”