Nokia continues to make good on a key objective to make its software for network operators available as a service. The vendor today revealed a trio of software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings and said it’s targeting a SaaS addressable market of a cumulative $3.1 billion through 2025.

Nokia is targeting service providers and enterprises with an expanding set of applications as it expects the market to grow at an annual growth rate of 25% to 30% for the next four years. The company also said it's working with multiple communications services providers to adopt its SaaS products, but declined to name any potential or existing customers. 

The previously released Nokia Data Marketplace, which allows operators to securely share and access data, is now available as a service with improved features for automation, efficiency, and scalability, according to Nokia.

Other services for analytics, security, and data management will be commercially available early next year, the vendor said. This includes Nokia Anomaly Detection, which uses machine-learning technology developed at Nokia Bell Labs to find and remediate network anomalies before customers are impacted. 

NetGuard Cybersecurity Dome, which also pulls algorithms from Nokia Bell Labs and data from the vendor’s Threat Intelligence Lab, aims to help operators secure 5G networks and drive security-related revenue from advanced services such as network slicing. 

Indeed, Nokia envisions a growing role for itself in network security as it expands its reach across extended detection and response (XDR); security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR); endpoint detection and response (EDR); managed services; and consulting. 

“Security is a really fragmented industry but we have decided that there is an opportunity for us and a need for us to play in security for fixed and mobile networks,” Mary O’Neill, Nokia’s VP of security, recently told SDxCentral. 

“Everything is driven by intelligence and machine learning,” including Nokia’s recently released NetGuard XDR Security Operations and other security products that pull data from Nokia’s threat intelligence outfit, O’Neill said.

NetGuard Cybersecurity Dome, a product first introduced by Nokia last month, uses a combination of machine learning, EDR, and SOAR to allow communications services providers to monitor, detect, and automatically remediate security vulnerabilities. Today’s announcement pushes the product to a SaaS-delivered model.

“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 earlier this year. 

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.

“With the groundwork we’ve already been laying, our SaaS delivery framework is in a very strong competitive position,” Sahgal said today in a statement. “This is a multi-year journey and we are going at it aggressively.”

Caroline Chappel, research director at Analysys Mason, described SaaS as “the software consumption model of the future” but noted “it is nascent in the telco market today.”

Nonetheless, she added, operators understand the benefits of SaaS and are waiting for vendors to respond. “Communications service providers must transform themselves to capitalize on these technologies, and the switch to SaaS delivery models is a critical component of their digital transformation strategies,” she said in a statement.