How Nokia vLabs leverages smarter IT economics to accelerate innovation with HPE
Gerri Gold shares how Nokia vLabs advances innovation with HPE Financial Services and HPE GreenLake
A couple of months ago, we launched a new tagline for our HPE Financial Services business. We tried a million phrases and interviewed many customers, asking them to share, in their words, where they saw HPEFS adding value to their business and their outcomes. And this is the tagline that landed, and which now sits next to our name:
Creating Smarter IT Lifecycles
Today I’d like to bring this tagline to life by sharing an inspiring story of smarter innovation with our long-time customer Nokia.
Networks are the key enabler for the digitalization of industries, and Nokia vLabs, also known as Nokia Virtual Labs, enables network innovation. This organization offers virtualized research and development (R&D) and testing capabilities to software developers, focusing on innovation and new cellular technologies, including 5G applications.
We know that in today’s fast-paced and competitive world, innovation is the key to success. But technology innovation often requires investment capacity. We know for instance, that AI-centric workload investments are driving a growing demand for technology infrastructure. In fact, it’s estimated that 67% of enterprises require some level of upgrade to infrastructure to meet future demand.1
Nokia vLabs turned to HPE, a longtime partner and supplier of technology and services, to develop a comprehensive solution that addressed both its financial and operational aspirations. The priority was to continue to transform its datacenter and optimize its asset utilization, and to invest in the future, contributing to Nokia’s ambitious R&D goals.
So, how could Nokia create a smarter IT lifecycle? Nokia’s first smart move was to successfully transition its owned IT infrastructure from ownership to an as-a-service model. This enabled Nokia vLabs to unlock capital from existing assets and fund future innovations.
HPE’s Accelerated Migration solution enabled innovation and better economics: Nokia leveraged this as a means to transition existing, owned IT assets into an incremental cash source while converting use of the systems to an as a service model. Customers can continue to use in-place technology, which becomes an enabler to bridge budget gaps, with no interruption to business operations.
What type of an as a service model? Nokia vLabs opted for the HPE GreenLake private cloud solution. With HPE GreenLake, Nokia can architect, design and deploy disaggregated networks powered by AI and support its R&D activities.
Another smart move, when you know HPE GreenLake has shown 30% TCO savings and 30% energy savings.2
Innovation does not have to happen at the expense of economics, and I just love how Nokia is proving this concept and progressing both!
“HPE Financial Services teams have helped us unlock significant funds from our existing assets, in fact representing about one year’s worth of hardware investment for the organization.”
Timothée Raffour, Financial Controller at Nokia recently wrote to our team to say that the “HPE Financial Services teams have helped us unlock significant funds from our existing assets- in fact representing about one year’s worth of hardware investment for the organization” and that he was feeling positive about how our “financial and IT asset expertise is accelerating the support to R&D innovation and new product development for Nokia.”
To me, this was a great example of creating value with smarter IT lifecycles, and in this case smarter innovation and economics.
I know our teams are proud to support Nokia vLabs in its journey of innovation and transformation, and I just love hearing about the difference our teams make to our customers.
Committing to value creation for our customers is what gives meaning to our jobs. Because creating smarter IT lifecycles starts by understanding their business and where they want to go, and it never gets boring for our teams!
1 Source: 451 Research, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence, Voice of the Enterprise: AI & Machine Learning, Infrastructure 2023
2 HPE has found that customers transitioning to HPE GreenLake from traditional Capex models can achieve a greater than 30% reduction in energy costs and total cost of ownership over 5 years (link).