Nokia is moving its on-premises IT infrastructure to Google Cloud. The networking vendor has increasingly embraced the cloud to bolster the capabilities of its equipment and software, but it hasn’t taken the same path with its internal operations until now.

The companies announced a five-year deal that calls for Nokia’s data centers and servers, and various software applications, to migrate to Google Cloud. The move also marks an obvious shift in strategy for Nokia’s new CEO Pekka Lundmark, who said “the challenge now is against complacency and accepting the status quo,” when he took the company’s reins in August. 

“The move to the cloud shouldn’t be a surprise as this is consistent with the IT strategy with most vendors,” Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst at ZK Research, told SDxCentral. However, he added, “the surprise is really that it took Nokia so long to do this.”

The COVID-19 crisis has “acted as an accelerant to get companies that were either on the fence or slow rolling cloud to make the pivot faster and I’m guessing that was the driver for Nokia,” Kerravala said. 

Nokia also framed the effort as an opportunity to improve operations and lower costs by reducing its real estate footprint, hardware purchases, and the amount of energy consumed by that equipment. 

“Nokia appears to be using Google as an opportunity to save on its capex and possibly even opex as a company that is trying to improve profitability,” said Anshel Sag, senior analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy. 

The companies said they have designed a migration plan that will allow Nokia to quickly exit its IT data centers so it can move its internal infrastructure and applications to services delivered by the public cloud. Nokia said the migration work is underway and it expects to complete that effort within two years. 

“This is crucial for how our employees collaborate so that we continue to raise the bar on meeting the needs of our customers,” Ravi Parmasad, VP of global IT infrastructure at Nokia, said in a statement. The company declined to share more details about its visions for Google Cloud, particularly if it plans to migrate its workforce to other Google services like its recently renamed Google Workspace, a suite of collaboration apps. 

“I don’t think that it necessarily ties Nokia to Google forever because of the importance of partnering with all of the big cloud vendors to deploy cloud-based infrastructure,” Sag said. “Partnering with Google might mean that the relationship between Google and Nokia may get strong and Nokia could become Google’s lead infrastructure partner.”

The Finnish vendor “is still figuring out who they are as an infrastructure vendor,” Sag said.

It’s also unclear the extent to which this move could benefit Nokia’s customers. Kerravala expects those benefits to largely be derived from a more agile Nokia, but he adds: “The current Nokia is a bit of an aircraft carrier as it’s very slow to change direction.”

Kerravala doubts this effort will have much bearing on Nokia’s external operations. “The various cloud providers have strengths and weaknesses in different areas. I would expect the 5G go-to-market portion of Nokia to work with all the cloud providers, depending on region and different needs,” he said. 

The financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.