Nokia announced plans to integrate Microsoft Azure Arc capabilities into the Nokia MX Industrial Edge (MXIE) platform to unlock the potential of mission-critical applications for Industry 4.0 use cases. Through the integration, Nokia MXIE and private wireless solution customers have seamless access to the full Azure ecosystem offering on MXIE.

Aimed to support industries including automotive, manufacturing, energy, logistics and government, the combination will enable use cases by allowing customers to run applications in the traditional cloud, as well as directly on their premises. Collaboration in these areas will provide numerous benefits such as increasing worker safety through artificial intelligence (AI) and automation, while decreasing the amount of needed backhaul with local data processing. Microsoft Azure Arc offers a simple way to deploy and manage Azure applications on-premise with multicloud resources, such as virtual or physical servers and Kubernetes clusters. It simplifies governance and management by delivering a consistent multi-cloud and on-premise management platform. 

Nokia MXIE is a future-ready, high-capacity and highly-resilient as-a-service operational technology (OT) on-premise edge solution that accelerates the digital transformation of operational technology (OT), and is powered with 4.9 GHz/LTE and 5G connectivity provided by the Nokia Digital Automation Cloud (DAC).

“We have built a leadership position with our private wireless networks solution and MX Industrial Edge platform in large part by working with our valued partners,” said Stephen Litjens, vice president, Nokia Enterprise Solutions. “Our extended collaboration with Microsoft will enable and enhance the performance of Industry 4.0 mission- critical applications allowing our customers to tap into Microsoft Azure Arc in the cloud and on the customer premise’s edge.” 

Microsoft Azure Arc running on Nokia MXIE provides enterprises with added access to Azure capabilities while benefiting from private wireless connected assets’ real-time data and on-premise, highly-resilient OT-centric edge processing. 

“Nokia is an established leader in fully integrated industrial edge and private wireless solutions to provide features and automated management tools that accelerate OT digitalization,” said Keith Sutton, chief technology officer, telco service line at Microsoft. “With Microsoft Azure Arc, a wide ecosystem of applications, and our long-standing work with Nokia, we can provide AI-powered insights and identify solutions to workflow issues for mission critical Industry 4.0 applications running at the edge.” 

Nokia has deployed mission-critical networks to more than 2,200 leading enterprise customers in the transport, energy, large enterprise, manufacturing, webscale and public sector segments around the globe. It has also extended its expertise to more than 450 large private wireless customers worldwide across an array of sectors and has been cited by numerous industry analysts as the leading provider of private wireless networking worldwide.