Nokia and Dell Technologies extended their long-standing partnership in a move that will see Nokia adopt Dell as a preferred infrastructure provider and Dell adopt Nokia as its preferred private 5G platform provider.

Dell is now the preferred infrastructure platform for Nokia’s AirFrame servers used for telecom cloud deployments. The two vendors will work to transition existing AirFrame customers to Dell’s infrastructure portfolio, including its PowerEdge servers to run core, edge and radio access network (RAN) workloads.

This move bolsters Dell’s ongoing push into the telecom space, including its most recent work in joining a new government-funded open RAN testing program led by AT&T and Verizon.

Nokia’s angle continues what has been a refocusing of its operations, which includes plans to cut up to 14,000 jobs as part of a “resetting” of its “cost base to protect profitability.”

Nokia last summer also unloaded primary support and ongoing development of its container and cloud infrastructure operations to Red Hat. This included Red Hat absorbing Nokia’s Container Services (NCS) and CloudBand Infrastructure Software (CBIS) into its container-focused OpenShift and virtual machine (VM)-focused OpenStack platforms.

That deal also involved Nokia sending more than 350 employees to Red Hat and called for Nokia to adopt Red Hat as its “primary cloud infrastructure platform” for the development, testing and delivery of Nokia’s core network applications.

It followed that move by selling its Device Management and Service Management Platform businesses to Toronto-based Lumine Group for around $200 million. The deal includes approximately 500 current Nokia employees moving to Lumine as part of the deal.

Private wireless partnership

One bright spot for Nokia has been its private network business, which CEO Pekka Lundmark recently told investors as part of the vendor’s latest earnings call “has been consistently delivering double-digit growth.” Nokia said it ended 2023 with more than 710 private wireless customers, and represented more than one-fourth of its overall enterprise sales.

This momentum should get a boost from Nokia’s Digital Automation Cloud (NDAC) private wireless platform becoming Dell’s preferred wireless platform base for enterprise edge use cases. This will include integrating NDAC with Dell’s NativeEdge platform that it released last May.

The Dell NativeEdge platform is designed as an edge computing platform that provides customers choice around software, IoT, multicloud tools and operational technology to simplify, automate and manage edge infrastructure. It provides enterprises with a managed set of services — running on top of either Dell or other validated equipment — that can provide a consistent management layer, regardless of connectivity to those edge devices and locations.

Dell OTEL work

The two will also work through Dell’s Open Telecom Ecosystem Lab (OTEL) for application testing and lifecycle management. This includes certifying workloads on Dell Telecom Infrastructure Blocks that support Nokia Cloud offerings and also continuing to work together on OEM opportunities.

Dell’s Telecom Infrastructure Blocks platform was unveiled in late 2022. It’s a cloud-native package of services designed to meet specific telecom workloads and use cases. They traverse from the network core out to the open radio access network (RAN) distributed and centralized units (DU/CU).