Microsoft and Nokia announce multi-industry strategic collaboration

A strategic collaboration has been announced by the tech giants Microsoft and Nokia. The collaboration will see both the companies work together on IoT, cloud and artificial intelligence (AI).

The two companies are aiming to collaborate and produce more offerings for enterprises and communications services providers (CSPs) across the globe. The collaboration will also help bring forth industrial digitization and automation to more organizations.

“We are thrilled to unite Nokia’s mission-critical networks with Microsoft’s cloud solutions,” said Kathrin Buvac, President of Nokia Enterprise and Chief Strategy Officer. “Together, we will accelerate the digital transformation journey towards Industry 4.0, driving economic growth and productivity for both enterprises and service providers.”

A major contributor to Industry 4.0 is cloud and IoT, by working together, Microsoft and Nokia will expedite the innovation process. The CSPs stand to gain directly from the collaboration as it will enable to them offer more to their customers.

One of the major collaborations between the companies is to host Nokia’s Analytics, Virtualization, and Automation (AVA) cognitive solutions on Azure. The solutions that will come out through this collaboration will specifically help CSPs move out of private data centers and on to Azure. This will reduce the expenses for CSPs and “transform operation for 5G.”

Jason Zander, executive VP of Microsoft Azure said that the company was excited about working with Nokia to create new opportunities for their customers across industries.