Kit vendor Nokia and IT infrastructure firm Kyndryl have signed a new three-year agreement which will see collaboration on LTE and 5G private wireless services, Industry 4.0 offerings, and a new partner innovation lab.

The two firms intend upon an ‘expansion’ of their partnership, which would appear to mean working together even more so on industry 4.0 tech projects, and they will open a partner innovation lab in Raleigh, North Carolina, which will be focussed on developing wireless connectivity and edge computing for enterprises. Palo Alto Networks is also involved in the new partner lab in some capacity.

Kyndryl’s network bods are apparently developing an ‘integrated system starting from the foundations of a typical Modbus process control network’, and thanks to Nokia DAC, private cellular connectivity helps with the high mobility and reach of the network, we’re told.

“Our partnership with Nokia has been focused on co-innovating and co-creating for customers to digitally transform their workspaces and operations,” said Paul Savill, Global Practice Leader of Network and Edge computing at Kyndryl. “The success we have seen in deploying private wireless for customers like Dow Chemical over the past 12 months, along with the global expansion of our collaboration, is a testament to our belief that we can jointly help companies drive Industry 4.0 transformation across all industries, with speed and scale.”

Chris Johnson, Head of Global Enterprise at Nokia added: “Kyndryl and Nokia have a shared vision for digital transformation, and as leaders in our respective industries we are driven to grow this market together. We are excited to build upon our existing success and strengthen our alliance targeting more enterprise customers across multiple industries. We are currently exploring and developing new integrated solutions and services for Edge, Cloud, IP networking, Optics, Fixed Access, 4G and 5G Core, and Network Operations software technologies, which can address the growing demand for mission-critical, industrial-grade wireless networking.”

The firms have been business buddies since February last year, and most of their collaborative projects are in the industrial manufacturing sector, including multinational petrochemical, mining and timber and utilities/energy companies. At MWC they will show off some ruggedised device management services they have made together and execs from each firm will jointly be on stage during one of the keynotes.

Many firms at MWC last year were waving about the usual eyebrow raising use cases to showcase 5G, such as AR and metaverse and gadgetry. As we all descend upon Barcelona once again in a couple of weeks, it will be interesting to see if that persists or if firms pivot to make more of a show of the less sexy but probably more useful applications of next gen connectivity such as this b2b team up.

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