Nokia and Google Cloud collaborate to hasten 5G applications with telco APIs

In the latest example of the extension and development of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) technology within the world of communications, Nokia is expanding its collaboration with Google Cloud to give global software developers the network solutions it believes they need to create innovative new 5G enterprise and consumer applications faster for their customers.

The partnership will see Nokia’s Network As Code platform with developer portal run on Google Cloud, enriching the developer experience via Google Cloud data and GenAI solutions and capabilities, including the Vertex AI development platform and Gemini 1.5 Pro. foundation model. This will enable developers to easily consume AI in their applications and improve productivity with coding assistance agents.

By working together, the companies plan to target industry use cases to promote with the Google Cloud developer community, starting with healthcare to deliver better, safer customer experiences.

Outlining what it believes users can gain from the partnership, Google Cloud said its “expansive” developer community, covering all major industries and geographies, will benefit by having access to standardised 5G network capabilities around the world, exposed through Nokia’s Network as Code platform with developer portal, giving them the technical tools required to quickly create new applications for their customers.

“Through this important collaboration with Nokia, we are enabling our global developer community to tap into the greenfield opportunity that 5G networks provide,” remarked Ankur Jain, vice-president of distributed cloud and global telco industry at Google Cloud. “Our developer community is a strong innovation driver globally, and we believe the telecoms space offers significant value creation opportunities through new applications.”

Nokia’s Network as Code platform with developer portal is designed to bring together telco networks, systems integrators and software developers from around the world into a unified ecosystem to accelerate the development of software applications that can harness 5G and 4G network capabilities. It provides developers with software development kits, network application programming interface (API) documentation, a “sandbox” to create software code for use case simulation and testing, and code “snippets” that can be included in building new applications. The platform is based on a revenue share model between developers, operators and Nokia.

Since its launch in September 2023, Nokia has signed collaboration agreements with 13 network operators and ecosystem partners in Europe, North America and South America. Commenting on this latest deal, Raghav Sahgal, president of cloud and network services at Nokia, said: “We are excited to expand our collaboration with Google Cloud, enabling thousands of Google Cloud developers to tap into our network capabilities so that they can create value for their customers faster.”

The collaboration with Google Cloud comes just days after Nokia introduced the Network Exposure Platform (NEP) to expand and simplify network API utilisation. The NEP software offering aims to expand and simplify the number of APIs available to enable the creation of network-powered applications for enterprise and industrial customers. It complements and integrates with the Network as Code platform with developer portal to provide a cloud-based platform to connect and monetise service provider networks with application developers worldwide.