Nokia’s shift to the cloud is revving up, and the company’s future success could very well depend on it. 

“One of our key objectives at Cloud and Network Services (CNS) is to pivot our software to an as-a-service model,” Raghav Sahgal, president of CNS at Nokia, told SDxCentral. 

That journey for Nokia’s mobile network operator customers are varied and complex, but the value shift to the cloud is already underway, and Nokia is embarking on a series of initiatives to meet the future demands and opportunities that flow from that transition, he said this week in a phone interview. 

Moving on-premises and tightly integrated software and network functions to the cloud is in the early stages and the shift will be gradual, but enterprises and carriers that don’t adopt these frameworks will face problems down the line, Sahgal explained.

Embracing the cloud isn’t just about virtualization, he said. It requires vendors, operators, and enterprises to implement cloud-native principles, including DevOps, and CI/CD (continuous integration, continuous delivery) to drive innovation and agility across their network infrastructure.

5G and the rise of digitalization at large is prompting telecom vendors like Nokia and its customers to operate and collaborate with a larger ecosystem of players, including public cloud providers. Nokia, earlier this month, struck a trio of deals with the world’s largest hyperscalers Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud to advance the 5G, radio access network (RAN), and edge markets.

Sahgal described those deals as an expansion of its previous cloud efforts that will hasten the development of a cloud native platform and container services platform that gives operators the flexibility to more seamlessly move and manage workloads across different clouds in a more consistent manner.

Nokia doesn’t so much want to pick winners and losers in the public cloud space for telecom, but rather create value for telcos by allowing them to migrate virtual network functions (VNFs) to Kubernetes-based containers at whatever pace and framework they see fit, he explained. 

“Every customer is at a different evolution of where they are in taking workloads to the cloud, so there are different phases, and what their strategy is in terms of how they will phase and which vendor” carriers opt to go with for different applications, Sahgal said. 

“It’s more about building the confidence on the customer side to take the mission-critical workloads and actually enable them and feel comfortable with it,” he said. “We don’t have a preference or a position against any one of these. They’re all very strongly focused on bringing this capability to the enterprises as well as the communications service providers.”

There will be notable permutations within each operator’s network topology and they expect that level of abstraction and flexibility from Nokia, according to Sahgal. “We started that journey a few years ago, and as such, I think we’ve got a strong position of moving our software to the cloud and on an any-cloud strategy. And it’s software that’s agnostic to a network type or a hardware type,” he said. 

The IT industry and enterprises adopted cloud much faster than communications service providers, and that’s “partly because the workloads that needed to run on the cloud infrastructure was something that was still evolving in terms of what the cloud vendors could take on, but I think they’ve made a lot of progress,” Sahgal explained.

Nokia’s recent advancements with the hyperscalers have also allowed Nokia to disaggregate its RAN products and services into the cloud by making those workloads and services available at the edge.

“When we say cloud native it means that you really have CI/CD capabilities and DevOps,” he said. “If you look at the DevOps, CI/CD framework, some part of it is a philosophy, and some part of it is the actual technology,” and Nokia is committed to helping its customers on that journey throughout its portfolio of products and services. 

“As 5G accelerates and becomes more pervasive, you have to be able to do this, otherwise you will not be able to get the true benefits of cloudification,” Sahgal said, describing it as a multi-part strategy that will evolve differently for each carrier.

Many operators have already encountered challenges with virtualization because the cost of managing a virtualized environment can be even higher than traditional architecture. “The reality is that if you don’t bring automation with virtualization, your costs will actually go up,” he said. 

“Bringing automation with virtualization is what got us to cloudification, and what got us from cloudification to true cloud native is putting the CI/CD, DevOps principles and open APIs so that you can connect to the digital ecosystem,” Sahgal explained. “From a design point, we’re all there, now it’s a matter of taking it, and sitting down with our customers to get them on that journey.”

Nokia’s cloud guru has no doubt more network workloads will move to the cloud, but only if the economic benefits of those shifts are realized. That’s an area that is still under development across the industry, particularly with very compute-intensive or latency-sensitive applications, but Sahgal said he’s confident that challenge will eventually rationalize itself. 

“There’s enough room in the new digital ecosystem for everybody to thrive, and so I think there’s a lot of value that cloud vendors bring, there’s a lot of value that service providers bring, and we can be the enabling technology in bringing our applications to help monetize and build the use cases,” he said. 

This requires enterprises and network operators to pick which applications will be best served by moving to the cloud soon, versus those that are more tightly integrated with network infrastructure. Applications or services that rely on elevated compute capacity or extremely low latency will probably move to the cloud at a later stage, according to Sahgal. 

Heavy workloads “will take a little bit longer to get there. And they may or may not get there, I don’t know, it just depends on the application” and performance requirements, he said. 

“The cloud is a very important part of that strategy for us, and this is what we are enabling because we believe we have to operate in a broader ecosystem and build software that is open and cloud ready so that our customers can participate in that broader ecosystem and drive any kinds of uses,” Sahgal said. 

“It’s a very different world when you deliver and consume as a service.”