BARCELONA, Spain – Nokia unveiled a new branding, marketing, and operational initiative that one of the world’s largest equipment vendors hopes will expand what it considers to still be that of a consumer device-focused brand. It also unveiled a pair of new telecom and enterprise-focused products to kick off those efforts.

The new branding initiative has Nokia literally carving up its name to signify the need for greater collaboration across the market. “When you take the different letters, which are kind of stick-like, and you put them together and everybody sees that it says Nokia,” Nokia CEO Pekka Lundmark told a press event just ahead of the MWC Barcelona 2023 event.

More than just a new font and colors, Lundmark also laid out pillars and enablers the vendor will use to finish off his three-year turnaround plan.

The first pillar Lundmark unveiled is Nokia’s push to grow its communication service providers (CSP) business at a faster rate than the market. Lundmark noted that the market itself is forecast to grow at a 1% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) through 2026, which “puts the onus on Nokia to take share from our competitors,” he stated.

“I believe there is now a unique opportunity for us to do that in the next few years,” Lundmark said, adding “our portfolio is now significantly more competitive than it was a couple of years ago.”

This might have been a gentle reference to Nokia having lost some business with operators due to what some had said was inferior equipment performance compared to rivals like Huawei, Ericsson, and Samsung. The most public of which was Verizon removing Nokia equipment from its initial 5G build out.

Lundmark later clarified that Nokia plans for its growth to come organically, with any form of acquisition to be complementary.

Lundmark also expressed confidence in the vendor gaining market share as “geopolitical tailwinds continue to favor us.” This is in reference to the ongoing push by many Western governments to remove legacy telecommunications equipment and prevent new equipment to be installed from China-based vendors like Huawei and ZTE.

Lundmark pointed to the enterprise space as another significant pillar to Nokia’s future success. That market is expected to grow at an overall 8% CAGR through 2027, with a more significant 27% growth CAGR tied to the private wireless space.

The Nokia exec said the vendor wants to increase its enterprise-derived revenues from around $2 billion last year, or just 8% of Nokia’s total revenue haul, to “double-digits as quickly as possible. And that double-digits I see as a floor rather than a ceiling,” Lundmark clarified.

Private 5G wireless is set to be a big part of that growth, as Nokia is already considered one of the leading vendors in that space. Lundmark noted last year that the vendor had signed 30 customers to private wireless contracts during its third fiscal quarter and previously stated Nokia ended 2021 with 420 private wireless customers.

One of Nokia’s other pillars is in developing new business models, with Lundmark specifically touting its as-a-service product approach. He highlighted Nokia’s recent launch of its 5G standalone (SA) core delivered as-a-service and its growing AVA (automation, visualization, analytics) platform.

"It's not just about us trying to go and take on public cloud," Nokia Chief Strategy and Technology Officer Nishant Batra explained. "Cloud means three things: it's flexibility, it's elasticity, and observability. And if networks don't have those three attributes, we will have a challenge. Not just us, the entire telecom industry. ... We will have to get cloud capabilities inside of Nokia to make that work."

These pillars will also rely on what Lundmark termed “enablers,” which include the re-shaped brand name and a focus on talent.

Lundmark said the new brand “articulates our role in delivering the next evolution in critical networking through networks that sense, think, and act.” This will hopefully elevate the company beyond its legacy heritage.

“I didn't like the fact that a significant part of the world still, for understandable historical reasons, sees us as a consumer brand,” Lundmark said. “We need to change that perception and shift focus onto the Nokia of today.”

The talent focus is based on “growth, skills, and development,” which Lundmark said is also aligned with Nokia’s technology strategy and commercial skills to support the broader pillars. The talent remark also comes as its Nordic rival Ericsson is set to shed nearly 10% of its workforce due to continued operational challenges.

Nokia also used the press event to unveil new products.

The first is its anyRAN that attempts to place Nokia at the center of the cloud ecosystem. The platform is designed as a central connection and control point for mobile operators and enterprise customers for their RAN infrastructure.

It’s designed to run on any of its partners’ cloud and server infrastructure and Nokia’s own AirScale base stations and AirFrame servers. The vendor specifically cited the platform working on hyperscalers like Amazon Web Serivces (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and IBM, and server vendors like Dell and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE).

HPE added to that announcement by stating it struck a memorandum of understanding to jointly offer an open cloud RAN product with Nokia to communication service providers and enterprises. HPE stated it completed an end-to-end layer-three data call running Nokia’s 5G Cloud RAN software with the Nokia layer-one accelerator running on the HPE ProLiant DL110 server platform.

The anyRAN platform builds on Nokia’s Cloud RAN SmartNIC, which is a layer-one inline acceleration card that can integrate into the server and cloud infrastructure. The SmartNIC uses dedicated silicon technology to optimize performance and resource needs.

That SmartNIC technology also provides Nokia’s AirFrame OpenEdge servers with 50% greater performance compared to the last iteration launched in 2022.

The second Nokia launch is its Habrok AirScale massive multiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO) antenna radios. This platform uses Nokia’s latest ReefShark system-in-chip (SoC) architecture and can support both 32-transmit/receive (32TR) and 64-transmit/receive (64TR) antennas.

The antenna can support up to 200 megahertz of occupied bandwidth and 400 megahertz of instantaneous bandwidth. This will allow an operator to aggregate different spectrum frequencies into one antenna and then support network slicing use cases.

The antennas will initially support the n78 spectrum band at 3.5 GHz that is used in parts of Europe. The vendor also noted that the radios weigh less than 25 kilograms, which is important for antenna infrastructure planning and construction purposes.