Nokia announced that it is strengthening its software portfolio in the areas of security, automation and monetization, bringing them together through artificial intelligence to better meet the needs of its customers and expand its footprint in addressable markets.

The announcement reflects the continued growth of Nokia’s software business and builds on the success of re-architecting its applications to make them fully cloud-native and deployable in any cloud environment, edge, public or private; in addition to launching multiple software service-as-a-service (SaaS) that provides faster time-to-value for CSPs and enterprises operating their telecom networks.

As part of the announcement, Nokia’s OSS, BSS and security software applications will be unified under the Nokia brand AVA (Automation, Visualization, Analytics). AVA delivers “Intelligence Everywhere” through artificial intelligence, machine learning, no-code provisioning, open APIs, multi-cloud orchestration and digital ecosystems.

Nokia is introducing the AVA open analytics framework to help CSPs accelerate AI projects, in part by simplifying how data is stored and used. According to various industry estimates, data scientists currently spend about 40% of their time on data wrangling and repetitive tasks that should be automated.

The AVA Open Analytics Framework moves customers from a single and centralized data “lake” to a hybrid data grid architecture that abstracts technical complexity and enables data scientists to focus on the needs of their data use cases. Nokia expects the framework to be fully commercially available in 2023.

Nokia also launched the IGNITE digital ecosystem, bringing together customers and application partners to accelerate innovation and commercialization of security, automation and monetization solutions.

Using Nokia’s ecosystem enablement platform (open-ecosystem.org), IGNITE simplifies collaboration with secure access to the resources needed to unlock value, including an on-demand product sandbox for experimentation and integration which has worked on more than 20 projects with clients and application providers, including developing new machine learning models, automation, and cybersecurity incident detection and response use cases.

Grant Lenahan, principal analyst at Appledore Research, said: “Nokia is repositioning its business applications under the AVA brand, with artificial intelligence and machine learning as core pillars of Nokia’s software offerings.”

Ahmad Latif Ali, Vice President, Telecom Insights Europe, IDC, said: “Telecoms are looking for smarter ways to monetize their network data. As they do, telcos must consider implementing next-generation AI, ML and data governance capabilities. Nokia’s announcement today is an example of suppliers redoubled efforts to drive further analysis of innovation and the value of 5G for CSPs and enterprises.”

Hamdy Farid, senior vice president of business applications at Nokia, said: “By strengthening our analytical framework and unifying our product portfolio under the AVA brand, we are strengthening our commitment to delivering deep intelligence in security, automation and monetization solutions. We look forward to partner with our CSP and enterprise customers and application developers to drive further innovation and create 5G value.”