Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Nokia are coming together to speed up the migration of service provider applications to the cloud, the latter has announced.

Through the deal, Nokia will support service providers throughout their AWS implementation with consulting, design, integration, migration and operation, alongside Internet of Things (IoT) use cases, through AWS Greengrass and Amazon Machine Learning among others.

On the strategic side, both companies will work together for 5G and edge cloud, including reference architectures, as well as providing an improved user experience for customers of Nuage Networks SD-WAN who also use AWS.

It’s worth noting that this isn’t ‘telco cloud’ in the strictest sense, but more ‘cloud-enabled’ for service providers. As far back as June 2014, this publication has examined Nokia’s strategy in this department, with Clare McCarthy, practice leader for telco IT at Ovum, saying at the time that the ‘key challenge’ in the coming few years for customer experience management providers was in assuring and monetising the IoT ecosystem.

“Our collaboration with AWS will accelerate the migration of service provider applications to the cloud and enable us to forge new opportunities together by delivering on next-generation connectivity and cloud services,” said Kathrin Buvac, Nokia chief strategy officer. “This is a wide-ranging collaboration, spanning our services capabilities in application migration, SD-WAN from Nuage Networks, 5G, and IoT, allowing new growth opportunities for our top customers across both the service provider and large enterprise market segments.”

“Service providers are accelerating their migration to AWS in order to drive innovation for their customers and deliver lower total cost of IT to their organisations,” said Terry Wise, AWS global vice president of channels and alliances in a statement. “We are excited to partner with Nokia to accelerate cloud transformation for service providers, and enable the digital transformation journey for our mutual large enterprise customers.”