There’s nothing Nokia likes more than trumpeting a deal win for its Nuage Networks SDN unit and this time it’s with the world’s biggest operator.

It’s actually a subsidiary called China Mobile (Suzhou) Software Technical Company that has chosen Nuage to provide the SDN platform for its public and private enterprise cloud services offering. The platform includes all kinds of juicy cloud buzzwords, including virtual machines, Kubernetes (K8S) containers and OpenStack Ironic-based bare metal servers.

Nokia says the Nuage Virtualized Services Platform (VSP) is nice and flexible, allowing it to support multiple cloud management systems, hypervisor and workload types, which seems to be something that appealed to China Mobile.

“Having a strong relationship with CMCC based on the work we’ve already done with them, we were especially pleased to be chosen to continue with this important project,” said Nuage CEO Sunil Khandekar. “The Nuage Networks solution allows CMCC to offer some very dynamic, high performing and attractive cloud services for their customers.”

The big kit vendors seem to be ramping up their deal-win virtue signalling, presumably trying to generate/demonstrate commercial momentum in the build up to the 5G feeding frenzy they’re all desperately hoping will take place in the next few years. But even in that context Nuage seems especially needy, and most of all in China, which maybe says something about Nokia’s strategic priorities.