Summary Bullets:
• Nokia’s Acquisition of Rapid’s Technology Assets: The move helps to boost Nokia’s Network as Code (NaC) product development and go-to-market efforts.
• Focus on Developers and API Ecosystem: Nokia is making headway in reaching more developers and expanding its API partner ecosystem.
Communications service providers (CSPs) have been looking at ways to monetize their networks, especially with their huge investments in 5G. One way Nokia has been working alongside CSPs is to simplify the way developers can extract the network capabilities exposed through programmable interfaces and embed them into their applications. This led to the launch of Nokia’s NaC platform in 2023, which provides non-telecoms-specialist developers access to industry standard APIs as well as sample code, SDKs, a development sandbox, and analytics. The aim is to help drive innovation leveraging CSP networks to create new consumer, enterprise, and industrial applications.
Nokia recently boosted its efforts through the acquisition of Rapid’s technology assets, which includes the API hub and the talent within Rapid’s R&D unit. This is a significant milestone for Nokia’s NaC initiative since one of the biggest challenges for CSPs has been the ability to engage developers – most of them with no telco knowledge and expertise. Nokia has been trying to bridge that gap and Rapid’s business is built around developers. Its public API marketplace – which allows developers to discover, consume, and manage APIs – has been used by over 4 million developers to access more than 40,000 APIs. These are APIs across all industries, not just communications and network APIs that are closer to the CSP business, giving Nokia exposure to a wider range of requirements and business models. This move also gives Nokia access to a well-established API management platform which allows companies to design, build, test, and share APIs internally and externally for monetization. Together with the R&D team, the Rapid assets will help Nokia accelerate its API-related product development and expand its API ecosystem.
Nokia’s strategy is to build an ecosystem around its NaC platform and to meet developers where they are, which is essential since it is counter-productive to induce enterprise developers to learn telecoms APIs. The company has already added more than 27 partners including service providers (BT, DISH, Orange, Telefonica, and Telecom Argentina), solution providers (Innova Solutions, Immersal, Domos, Bounteous Accolite, and Global Logic), and aggregator platforms (Google Cloud and Infobip). In particular, the partnership with Infobip brings Nokia’s network APIs to Infobip’s developer community that have been leveraging communications APIs to create omni-channel experiences. Similarly, the partnership with Google Cloud announced in June 2024 includes running NaC platform with a developer portal on Google Cloud. This again brings Nokia’s platform to a huge number of Google Cloud developer community and giving them the experience they are familiar with including the integration with Google Cloud’s GenAI capabilities (Vertex AI and Gemini 1.5 Pro) enabling developers to improve productivity with the coding assistant. With Rapid, Nokia is able to bring telecom APIs to more developers. Since developers use Rapid to find APIs they need, having telecom APIs in the same marketplace makes it easier for these APIs to be discovered and used.
Nokia is not alone in this network API journey. For a long time, CSPs have been trying to monetize their network assets through APIs. Instead of tackling it individually as they had done in the past, they have now embraced standardization and collaboration with partner ecosystems. The CAMARA/Open Gateway Initiative has standardized the telecom APIs but there is still much work to be done to bring developers to the table. Ericsson also has a similar vision. Both Ericsson/Vonage and Nokia are trying to fill that need with sample code, documentation, hackathons, and so on. For Ericsson, the acquisition of Vonage kickstarted the process and it recently announced a joint venture (JV) with a dozen of major CSPs across different regions to support CAMARA-based APIs on a worldwide basis, enabling multiregional coverage with a single contract. The JV is also targeting hyperscalers (Google Cloud is the charter hyperscale customer) and CPaaS providers (Vonage is the charter CPaaS customer). These partnership ecosystems are developed with slightly different goals but fundamentally, they are making an attempt to attract developers to build applications using programmable network capabilities. At this stage, it is not about competition among traditional rivals. It is more critical to ensure the success of CSPs in unlocking the value of their network through open collaboration. CSPs should consider participating in multiple ecosystems if they meet the goal of having more applications using network capabilities.