Alibaba taps Nokia to enhance edge cloud products

Nokia and Alibaba Cloud have joined forces to streamline the Chinese cloud giant's enterprise edge capabilities.

As part of the deal, Nokia will integrate its private wireless network system Digital Automation Cloud (DAC) with Alibaba Cloud's service offering to aid customers' digital transformation strategies.

DAC expedites the adoption of enterprise industrial Internet of Things (IoT) with its end-to-end, high-performance private wireless networking and edge computing functionality.

The platform helps enterprises meet changing market demands through secure wireless asset connectivity and the use of operational data to enhance processes. Open APIs within the DAC, too, facilitate third-party service integrations, increasing the pool of applications available to enterprises.

"We will continue to innovate cloud service offerings and benefit our global customers, enabling them to digitalize their operations and deploy new industrial applications on the edge," said Li Li, vice president of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence.

"By leveraging Nokia’s private wireless solution, our enterprise customers will benefit from plug-and-play high-speed, low-latency and, connectivity together with timely intelligence management and processing."

Commenting on the joint enterprise edge service offering, Nokia said its wireless network solution will allow Alibaba Cloud's customers to securely and reliably connect a wide variety of equipment, sensors, and vehicles. Having the ability to analyze data at the edge will also allow enterprises to harness so-called Industry 4.0 capabilities such as real-time monitoring, predictive maintenance, and autonomous operations, resulting in improved efficiencies.

"Nokia has already contributed to the digital transformation of more than 420 enterprises globally with our private wireless offer," said head of enterprise solutions at Nokia, Stephan Litjens. "We are excited to collaborate with Alibaba Cloud by bringing our global networking knowledge and enterprise digitalization experience to enhance their cloud business service offering to a broader market of enterprise customers worldwide."