Nokia’s legacy in software is long, but its hardware-centric core is legendary and the company is trying to reach a new level of parity on that front as 5G takes root and software flows increasingly throughout mobile networks.

The Finnish vendor this week announced a pair of cloud-native software applications designed to help carriers improve the management and operation of their networks. Both applications are built on Nokia’s Common Software Foundation (CSF), which runs on public and private clouds.

Nokia Assurance Center enables operators to run fault and performance management processes under a single app to determine root cause analysis and automatically resolve those issues. Nokia Experience Center focuses on the subscriber experience and equips operators with tools to categorize network services based on the requisites of specific verticals.

Nokia also announced a new agreement with Rakuten that calls for the vendor to help the Japanese conglomerate to reach its goal of deploying a fully virtualized, cloud-based greenfield mobile network. Nokia says it will supply Rakuten Mobile with services designed to deploy and integrate the operator’s radio access network (RAN) with remote radio heads connected to cloud RAN software on the edge.

Nokia is also providing Rakuten with its cloud RAN technology, AirScale radios, and its AirGile cloud-native core for network functions. Rakuten Mobile, which plans to commercially deploy its 4G LTE network in April, will also make use of Nokia’s software for session border control and VNFs for cloud-based services.

These recent announcements underline the momentum Nokia is experiencing in software. While the initial focus was to centralize non-critical logic pieces of Nokia’s services into common components, the company has been more recently developing a cloud-native foundation.

In combining those efforts, Nokia is striving to deliver a “truly cloud native” software stack that can run applications in containers with full lifecycle management and deliver microservices to enable telemetry, network upgrades, and other specialized services, Nokia Software CTO Ron Haberman told SDxCentral in a phone interview. “We took the CSF concept and converted it into a microservice world as well,” he said.

“We took these components that previously had to be integrated into the different software elements and are now enabling them as microservices at runtime, such that the different pieces of software no longer have to integrate these components,” Haberman explained.

“The bulk of the of the software that we make is either already cloud native per the definition or will be this year — a few exceptions here and there that would linger to the beginning of next year, but by Q1 of next year, we will have full coverage,” he said.

Adoption of cloud-native software among operators is now accelerating, and that’s a significant change from six months ago, according to Haberman. “The adoption rate accelerated greatly and we have now several big operators that are either looking at adoption on their platforms but on bare metal, or even taking some of the [cloud native network functions] into public cloud and are asking us to ensure that they can consume it in a native format from public cloud providers.”

However, there is still a learning process underway at most operators, especially among those that want to run their own infrastructure, he explained. There is also a “bit of the Wild West” going on as operators move to microservices and their integration map grows in kind, he added. “Something that used to really just be a box is now a collection of software that you own [through] open source, and platform services that need to be integrated.”

Nokia is working with operators to plan for that, test it, and upgrade services to deliver those capabilities, Haberman said.

Network slicing is a critical capability that will eventually be deployed by cloud-native 5G networks, but it’s still a ways off, he said. “There’s going to be a lot of experimentation this year” as operators seek out opportunities to dynamically slice portions of their network for specific use cases anchored by key capabilities around latency and other industry-specific requirements, he added.

“Those will take a little bit more time to manifest themselves. They have some dependency on capabilities that will need to be deployed in the radio, as well as the core, as well as the orchestration platform. I think we’ll see more of that happening next year,” Haberman said.