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Accelerating Nokia’s digital journey

by Nishant Batra
3 Aug 2021
Accelerating Nokia’s digital journey

As Nokia’s CEO Pekka Lundmark laid out at Capital Markets Day in March 2021, connected digital enterprises are transforming businesses everywhere, especially in the telecommunications and technology industries. Pekka also warned that businesses that are not serious about digitalization risk being left behind. As a leader in 5G, private wireless and analytics solutions, Nokia is powering the global digital transformation of communication service providers and enterprises. But how is Nokia transforming itself into a best-in-class digital enterprise?

As Nokia shifts to the “Accelerate” phase of our transformation, we are increasing the digitalization of our own operations with an ambitious, company-wide and multi-year strategic global initiative we call “One Nokia Digital.”

The overall goal of One Nokia Digital is to increase the company's performance and competitiveness through the digitalization of operations. It covers:

  • Internal operations to reduce risk and cost to operate, increase efficiency and productivity, and develop business agility.
  • Customer Experience and Services for more competitive offerings and deployment services, increased efficiency in account management, and improved customer satisfaction.
  • R&D to develop productivity, reduce development cycle time, improve quality, and be more competitive in network management.

The program has wide-ranging implications. It will modernize, standardize and harmonize core business processes with a new single state-of-the-art enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. It will also span agile customer contract lifecycle management to scalable cloud-based customer B2B service, and the Nokia Delivery Platform (NDP) program that focuses on the digitalization of customer project delivery management and efficient collaboration between project teams.

We are not just focused on next-generation application management, as we have strong transformation ambitions in our infrastructure. Our IT Network Transformation program is completely transforming our wide area and local area networks (WAN and LAN) using Nokia’s own IP networking products and architecture design. In addition to massive operational efficiency and cost savings, this transformation has also made our network ready for the future. To accelerate our journey, we are migrating our on-premise IT infrastructure onto Google's public cloud using the Google Cloud Platform. This will provide a superior operational experience by using AI Machine Learning to drive a step-change in our productivity at all levels in the company with an architecture that is flexible and scalable for rapid deployment of new applications, leveraging DevOps, Containers and Infrastructure-as-code.

Such a massive digital transformation in a company with Nokia’s scale and breadth is never quick or easy. Nor is it just about tools and processes; it is a mindset.

To imbue a digital transformation mindset and accelerate our digital journey, we recently hired Alan Triggs as our Chief Digital Officer. Alan brings deep expertise and experience in digitalization and IT transformation at scale, as well as a deep understanding of the telco and enterprise world. He will lead the delivery of seamless technology experiences to Nokia employees and external users by partnering with business groups. Alan’s addition to Nokia’s world class digital and IT infrastructure team is a great step forward to reach the next level of digital maturity for the company.

We are excited to partner with Alan and each of our employees and key technology partners in this digital journey, and we look forward to sharing more details as we progress on our digital transformation.

Nishant Batra

About Nishant Batra

Nishant is a global leader with broad experience in strategy and technology development and portfolio management, as well as in having significant profit and loss responsibilities across the telecom and enterprise sectors. He has been intimately involved in bringing cutting-edge products to market across industry domains and has a deep understanding of the silicon, software and system requirements necessary for innovation.

At Nokia, Nishant is the Chief Strategy and Technology Officer (CSTO) with responsibility for corporate strategy, technology architecture and pioneering research at Nokia Bell Labs; Nokia’s information technology (IT) infrastructure and digitalization initiatives; centralized security domains; and Nokia’s venture capital activities.

His function lays the path for Nokia’s future technology innovation and identifies the most promising areas in which Nokia can create new value. By setting the company’s vision and understanding the evolving market and business dynamics, Nishant is responsible for developing a coherent business-strategy, technology and architecture vision across the company and implementing it in partnership with the Nokia Business Groups. Furthermore, he is responsible for establishing a solid research foundation on which Nokia innovates new products and for providing the critical support infrastructure that ensures all Nokia business units can deliver that vision properly and securely.

Prior to joining Nokia in 2021, Nishant worked at Veoneer in Sweden, a worldwide leader in automotive technology, where he was Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer. Before this, he spent 12 years at Ericsson holding several positions, most recently as Head of Product Area Networks.

Nishant holds an MBA from INSEAD; a master’s degree in Telecommunications and a master’s degree in Computer Science from Southern Methodist University in the US; and a bachelor’s degree in Computer Applications from Devi Ahilya University in India.

Nishant is based in Espoo, Finland and has lived and worked in Asia, Europe and the US.

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