Nokia Bell Labs shows off its big new aaS

Nokia Bell Labs has shocked the world with the invention of another aaS, this time targeting the big, wide world of 5G.

Putting together a consortium of players throughout Europe, the new aaS rolls right off the tongue, standing for Next Generation Platform-as-a-Service. The consortium is part of the European Commission’s 5G Infrastructure Public-Private Partnership (5G-PPP), and features organizations such as BT, Orange, ATOS and the University of Milano-Bicocca.

“The consortium’s ambition for developing a next generation PaaS is to enable developers to collaborate within the 5G ecosystem (operator, vendor, third party) in order to ignite new businesses; thereby increasing market scale and improving market economics,” said Bessem Research Manager for Nokia Bell Labs, and Project Leader for the consortium.

The consortium is relatively logical, as the majority of the 5G revolution will take place in the cloud. Following the shift to the cloud, such platform-as-a-Service models will become much more common.

It’s also another small step towards virtualization, but has had a troubled road to date. Some corners of the industry might complain it has been taking too long, but when you look at it logically there is a very good reason for this delay; virtualization is really difficult.

The platform itself will aim to have two features. Firstly, a 5G cloud-native platform must facilitate building, shipping and running VNF applications with ‘telco-grade’ quality. And secondly, it must be open to allow the combination all sorts of third-party applications with those VNFs.