The two have agreed a five-year, strategic collaboration during which Nokia will migrate its on-premise IT infrastructure to Google Cloud.
Nokia claims the deal reflects an “important operational shift to a cloud-first IT strategy” and the collaboration “is expected to drive meaningful operational efficiencies and cost savings”.
These will be gleaned from a small real estate footprint, less energy consumed by hardware, and the purchase of less hardware capacity.
Nokia will migrate its data centres and servers around the world, as well as various software applications, onto Google Cloud infrastructure.
The vendor believes this will expand employees’ collaboration and innovation capabilities and improve its delivery to customers.
Products and professional services
Term of the deal were not made public, but Nokia stated it use a suite of Google Cloud products and professional services. The companies have worked together for a few months to customise a migration approach that will allow Nokia to exit its IT data centres rapidly, but minimise business impact while building a strong foundation for the future.
Google Cloud will deploy systems integrators, solutions specialists and engineers for a stable migration as well as provide its infrastructure-as-a-service portfolio of compute, networking, and storage solutions.
Nokia’s infrastructure and applications will run in the public cloud or in a Software-as-a-Service model in future. The migration has started and is expected last 18 to 24 months.
Fundemental change
Ravi Parmasad, VP Global IT Infrastructure at Nokia, said, “Nokia is on a digital transformation path that is about fundamentally changing how we operate and do business. 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…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.”