Nokia is extending work with Broadcom’s VMware division to integrate the latter’s cloud-based network functions into the former’s latest Telco Cloud Platform (TCP) update, a move that continues long-standing work between the two vendors and a potential reinforcement of VMware’s telecom ambitions.

The latest integration has Nokia inserting VMware’s Telco Cloud Platform 5.0 iteration into its centralized VMware lab. This will allow Nokia to validate its network functions to work on the latest VMware platform.

Those Nokia functions include virtual network functions (VNFs) like IP multimedia subsystem (IMS), policy and signaling, and packet core that can run in virtual machine (VM) environments, and containerized network functions (CNFs) like subscriber data management, policy and signaling, and packet core that can run in containerized environments.

This validation work allows operators to more easily deploy those Nokia services as either VNFs or CNFs running in a VMware TCP environment. It also extends what has been ongoing efforts between the two vendors.

Nokia made a hard shift toward cloud support for its telecommunication platform and services in early 2021, which was part of a broader operational reset for the vendor. This work included reformatting those platforms into software that could be run in various cloud and virtualized environments.

One of those environments was on top of VMware’s TCP. Seeds of that initial Nokia-VMware integration work began to gestate in late 2019, with the first validation results coming in 2022.

Nokia has since shifted primary support and ongoing development of its container and cloud infrastructure operations to Red Hat, but continues to support all existing 5G core integrations with Red Hat rivals like VMware. Red Hat is also continuing to support overlaid 5G core systems from other vendors like Ericsson and Samsung.

Is Broadcom impacting VMware’s telecom success?

Nokia’s latest validation work is a victory for VMware, which has seen its legacy operations upended by new parent company Broadcom.

VMware initially rolled out its overarching TCP in 2021, which itself was an expansion of its reorganized and repacked stack of technologies for network operators. That initial work also came under VMware’s previous owner Dell Technologies, and prior to the more recent Broadcom acquisition.

VMware’s TCP did gain some initial traction in the market, most famously with U.S.-based greenfield operator Dish Network. That operator, which more recently changed its name to Boost Mobile, used parts of VMware’s TCP as part of its virtualized 5G network deployment.

However, that work hit a speed bump last year when Boost Mobile made the bold move to swap out its legacy VMware-based container-as-a-service (CaaS) platform for one from Wind River, which the carrier is now using to manage its containerized edge-to-cloud applications.

Boost Mobile management had previously stated they had tested and onboarded “dozens” of cloud-native 5G network functions from “multiple software vendors” on top of the VMware TCP that used its embedded Kubernetes container orchestration capabilities and cloud-native principles to “dynamically move and scale workloads within the cloud, based on consumer demand.”

Boost Mobile CTO Eben Albertyn during a recent trade show termed “cost effectiveness” or a combination of “operational performance, strategic roadmap, and overall cost,” as a reason for the change. The radical move was helped by Boost Mobile having deployed a cloud-based, open architecture network that included virtualized and open radio access network (RAN) components.

“We felt we were not going to be price gouged, so we've made some changes on the CaaS layer that has allowed us to actually now be faster and better than what we were before, because we have open RAN and we're able to make these changes very, very quickly,” Albertyn said during the recent CCA Mobile Carriers Show. The executive later added that “the predatory pricing that showed up from VMware, price gouging from some other people is not something that we looked forward to.”

Rivals have also noted telecom operators reacting to Broadcom’s changes to VMware.

“My personal, anecdotal experiences this last year has been a lot of the emotional, visceral reactions to what's happened, and I think people are digesting that and now they're figuring out what those next steps are and not doing so in a panicked manner,” Andrew Sullivan, senior manager for virtualization and platform tech marketing at Red Hat’s Hybrid Platform Business Unit, told SDxCentral in an interview last year. “It's less of the ‘oh, I need to move right now,’ and more of the, ‘OK, what's my strategy going forward and how do I want to handle virtualization? Do I want to continue to have a single vendor strategy? How do I want to diversify across multiple hypervisors?’”

Sullivan added that those questions “very much triggered an out-of-cycle reevaluation.”

“I think folks are being more honest with themselves about what they need from a virtualization platform, and really giving a deep look into, ‘this was easy before and I didn't have to invest much time, effort, energy, into it, it did everything I need. Should I continue doing that? How do I again diversify?’”