It’s well known that Nokia is leading the digital revolution, enabling connectivity and digital advancement for billions of consumers and thousands of enterprises: Creating technology that helps the world act together. What’s perhaps less well known is that Nokia is also transforming itself into a best-in-class digital enterprise, making our company both fit for success and a living, breathing example of digital best practice.

Last year we launched One Nokia Digital, our company-wide, multi-year strategic global initiative to increase Nokia’s performance and competitiveness by creating digital products and services and digitalizing operations.

As a part of this initiative, we decided to use Nokia’s best-in-class products and consciously “fly our own jets” where possible. One great example is that we have just adopted a new regionalized Wide-Area Network (WAN) infrastructure model bringing flexibility, avoiding single provider dependency, and replacing 3rd party gear with Nokia’s portfolio of Service Access Switches, Service & Interconnect Routers, and Nuage Network Services Gateways (NSG) software-defined (SD) WAN solution. With our modernized global WAN Infrastructure, all Nokia sites now benefit from a standardized and simplified WAN that is high-performance, flexible, and cost-effective!  More than 200 sites and 330 circuits were transformed, increasing bandwidth capacity while achieving a 49% reduction in overall service cost.  This flexibility enabled us to introduce Segment Routing based Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) in our backbone network providing lower latency, faster recovery during failovers and improved link utilization.

Our Nokia factories in Oulu, Finland, and Chennai, India, play their part by deploying our Private Wireless solution for wireless connectivity and edge applications across production devices like Robots (assembly lines), Autonomous Intelligent Vehicles (AIV), and Real-time Video Analytics.  Powered by our very own Nokia Digital Automation Cloud (NDAC): an industrial-grade, end-to-end private wireless networking and edge computing platform, we’re creating efficient, high-productivity factories of the future.

World-class partnerships are also helping us get there. Today, 40% of our corporate applications are running in a Cloud or being delivered in a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, up from 29% a year ago. Earlier this year, we took a major step forward in our Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) modernization by launching our Finance Digital Core in Finland, running on a modern SAP platform in Google Cloud. This marks the first phase of a multi-year global deployment, which will see us harmonize core business processes and operate with even greater speed and agility. 

One of our more recent innovations is our new ‘Nokia Cloud PC,’ which allows PCs to be delivered and fully set up at an employee’s home without the need to be physically near a corporate LAN for PC imaging, configuration, or renewals, using Microsoft Autopilot and Azure AD. It has become a vital element of our flexible working approach.

We’ve also kicked off a further modernization of our People systems, replacing legacy solutions with a modern Oracle-based SaaS solution which helps us standardize our processes on a common data platform and enable a consistent user experience for our employees globally.

Speaking of data, the next step on our journey is a new organization-wide Corporate Data Strategy to address all the opportunities and challenges that data presents. I would like to take this opportunity to introduce Fredrik Backner, who will be joining as Nokia’s first Chief Data Officer. Fredrik comes with vast experience in the Retail and Communication industries as a Chief Data Officer and leader in Analytics. While we are just beginning this part of our journey, with Fredrik on board, we look forward to improving and innovating on our data quality, access, architecture and advanced analytics capabilities.

Of course, digitalization is continuously evolving, and I look forward to working with Fredrik and the rest of the team at Nokia as we continue this digitalization journey with access to some of the best tools, solutions, partners, and skilled people in the business.