Nokia Corp. is pivoting its value proposition to cloud in a major way.

The Finnish telecom company is embarking on a series of cloud-based initiatives designed to embrace cloud native principles, such as DevOps, continuous integration and continuous delivery of services.

“We have to bring capabilities to tie networks together, migrate workloads between locations, and maybe most importantly, as we release new versions of our software and enable new capabilities, we want to put it in the hands of the service providers and developers right away,” said Ron Haberman (pictured), chief technology officer at Nokia. “We need to enable continuous delivery. It’s quite familiar in the cloud world but quite new to telco.”

Haberman spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the recent Mobile World Congress event. They discussed cloud native support for 5G deployment and the need to increase the pace of innovation for the telco industry. (* Disclosure below.)

Supplying network functions

In February, Nokia announced the launch of its DelOps, or Delivery and Operations initiative, described as an approach to manage complexity of 5G core software delivery and provide a new suite of CI/CD services to support communications service providers. The combined offering is designed to streamline lifecycle management of cloud native 5G core applications.

“5G and the transformation to cloud native, generically speaking, go very nicely hand in hand,” Haberman said. “Nokia is a supplier of network functions which are now getting distributed into public cloud, in the private cloud and on the edge.”

Earlier this year, Nokia struck deals with Amazon Web Services Inc., Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud to further the company’s evolving strategy in radio access network and edge markets.

“It’s been a few years for these things to come together,” Haberman said. “We want to give the tools to indeed go fast because the name of the game in moving to cloud native is to speed up innovation.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Mobile World Congress event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Mobile World Congress. Neither TelcoDR Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE