Nokia will be introducing multiple Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) services for communication service providers (CSPs), in an important first step to giving operators a less expensive, more flexible, and more customer-centric pathway for operating their network and delivering new services.

Over recent years Nokia has taken a culmination of steps to enhance CSP network operations, including rearchitecting its software applications to make them fully cloud-native and deployable in any cloud environment, edge, public or private.

Nokia’s approach to SaaS for CSPs is about improving value and reducing complexity by providing innovative software consumed purely on demand through a subscription, eliminating large upfront capital expenditure; by avoiding the need to perform on-site software maintenance and updates; and by accelerating CSPs’ ability to launch new services faster and achieve “time to value” quicker.

As part of the line-up of SaaS services, Nokia Data Marketplace (NDM) is now commercially available through a SaaS framework to give CSPs an easy and secure way to share and access data. NDM was launched “as a service” earlier this year. The new SaaS version of NDM offers enhanced automation, efficiency and scalability to CSPs and enterprises in a variety of industry verticals, including energy, public sector, transportation, and smart cities.

Raghav Sahgal, President of Cloud and Network Services at Nokia, said: “The convergence of 5G, cloud-native software and SaaS creates a great and fast-growing opportunity for Nokia. With the groundwork we’ve already been laying, our SaaS delivery framework is in a very strong competitive position. It enables a combination of rapid time to value with on-demand access for Nokia SaaS applications and low cost of ownership, based on a pay-as-you-go / pay-as-you-grow commercial model. This is a multi-year journey and we are going at it aggressively.”