In an exclusive interview with Telecom Review, Adrian Hazon, VP, global product sales development, Nokia Networks, talked about his company’s strategies, cloud-native technologies and focus on B2B technology innovation, as well as the importance of their participation in MWC 2023.
Nokia has recently shared its updated company and technology strategies. Can you elaborate on the key enablers that will influence delivering acceleration across the company’s products and mobile networks business?
I think over the last couple of years, we've been very clear about our vision and strategy, and part of that is to have our own System on Chip (SoC) products. We announced last year that all of our products will be powered by our ReefShark SoCs and that is now the case with 97% of our portfolio. So that really has enabled us to keep ahead of the customer requirements and innovate with our products. Our baseband, for example, is best in class for capacity, connectivity, and so on and so forth. And again, you'll see on our booth during MWC this week, we have the latest Habrok radios, so 32TRX radios and 64TRX for different use cases, which are lightest, highest power, etc. and much smaller and more power efficient than previous generations. So that's really helping us keep pace with, and ahead of where we need to be.
Can you share how Nokia turn open and cloud-native technologies into a positive step forward for the industry, especially this industry that’s very dynamic at the moment?
As Nokia, we've always been very innovative, if you like, starting back with OffSign and xRAN and then O-RAN (Open RAN), we've been at the forefront of leading innovation and openness in the industry. So you will see in MWC this week that we've announced the concept of anyRAN, meaning all of the ecosystem can connect with Nokia. This means that the purpose-built RAN that will co-exist with Cloud-RAN. You'll see that we've also made quite a few announcements with our main six partners, which are HP, Google, Azure or Amazon, Dell and IBM. You can see all of these on our booth; you can see what we're doing on their booths. So you can see, actually, that we're building this ecosystem towards the full cloud evolution of the networks.
With the refreshed brand showing Nokia’s focus on B2B technology innovation, how will unveiling new technologies further empower Nokia’s customers and partners?
As I said, underpinning all of our innovation is the fact we have our own SoC. We’ve focused a lot on improving … content as well. The green agenda and energy efficiency is key to everything we do. Every software release that we put out there now has more and more features for improving the efficiency of the networks equally. The radio generations are getting lighter and more powerful — more energy efficient. So all of this is driving towards improving the overall network performance. But equally, we see that cloud and purpose-built networks will coexist as well. So we see for the next few years, of course, there's a lot still to be done and building out, with the 5G networks moving from non-standalone to standalone. But we see as time progresses, yes, there's a place for Cloud and the opportunity there to share the workloads in the network across the cloud.
What is the importance of Nokia’s participation in MWC this year? How will this drive collaboration among other tech players and realize the exponential potential of networks?
I think MWC is always a great opportunity for everyone to network and to see the latest innovations across the industry. I think as you see, as I mentioned earlier about anyRAN, the opportunity for us was actually being in one place with all of our partners, and not only have them on our booth but us on their booth as well, to show that as one collaborative ecosystem, quite a lot can be achieved. That's one of the main things that I think is really important for us this year. And also to get out there with the new brands and show that, as a company, we continue to innovate, and we have a lot of interesting products out there as well.