Nokia is acquiring Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s (HPE) radio access network (RAN) intelligent controller (RIC) business it picked up as part of its $14 billion Juniper Networks acquisition, a move that bolsters Nokia’s AI-RAN push and sheds some light on HPE’s ongoing Juniper integration plans.

The deal has Nokia licensing HPE’s RIC assets and taking on the associated development team. Those assets will be integrated into Nokia’s MantaRay service management and orchestration (SMO) and network automation platform, with the development team transferred to Nokia’s Mobile Networks division.

One of those transferees appears to be Constantine Polychronopoulos, group VP at Juniper Networks, who noted the move on LinkedIn.

The RIC operates in the middle of an Open RAN deployment as a kind of linkage to the wider network. It allows operators to deploy xApps and rApps that then allow operators to design and control RAN functions, providing administrative RAN sovereignty over functions that are typically implemented as proprietary features on base stations.

These “apps” are microservice-based applications operating in near-real time (xApps) and non-real time (rApps) that provide an operator with more control over their Open RAN environments.

Juniper Networks initially got in the RIC game through a licensing deal with Türk Telecom Group subsidiary Netsia. Those efforts eventually built into Juniper gained early RIC success with Rakuten Symphony, Viavi, Intel, and Vodafone.

HPE gained those RIC assets as part of its Juniper acquisition, with HPE management initially touting Juniper-related telecom opportunities. That aligned with analysts’ touting those Juniper RIC assets boosting HPE’s competitive position against rivals like Cisco.

“I think [this] is one area where they can make competitive inroads and that Cisco doesn’t have a dominating market position in at all at this juncture,” Ron Westfall, research director at The Futurum Group, noted in a podcast shortly after that deal was announced. “And specifically, Juniper’s RAN intelligent controller… brings that intelligence and programmability to the RAN by enabling third-party applications. This is going to be important [to] improve service experience, reduce costs, and deliver new business models.”

However, HPE has since been tight-lipped on actual integration plans beyond boilerplate responses around “thoughtful” integration.

What is Nokia getting?

The Juniper deal boosts Nokia’s RIC efforts, which have been overshadowed by rivals.

Tommi Uitto, president of Nokia’s Mobile Networks division, noted in a press release that the HPE deal will bolster its ability to offer customers an “AI-driven automation, orchestration, and open ecosystems, enabling them to manage multivendor networks more efficiently and prepare for the transition from 5G to 6G.”

Nokia’s AI work is under the MantaRay umbrella, which the vendor previously described as having four specific product focuses: network management, SON, energy, and RIC. Mark Atkinson, SVP and head of RAN product line management at Nokia, described these as a “suite of AI-based operability and solutions for managing the networks as a whole, like radio access networks.”

MantaRay Network Management is the “future platform” for Nokia’s extensive purpose-built RAN, cloud RAN (cRAN), and core network management products designed to “scale from a single server for small enterprises to large-scale implementations.” This would be from small-scale private network deployments up to nationwide 5G networks.

“We're bringing more AI-based capabilities into MantaRay Network Management over time with a view that networks are becoming so complicated that it's impossible for human engineers to manage them in the most efficient way,” Atkinson said. “We used to do a lot of things based on automation, though the idea of automation is that you're automating human tasks, but they're still task-based, whereas the AI and machine learning aspect is that the system learns over time how to best optimize performance itself.”

Uitto recently claimed that its MantaRay SMO platform was being picked up by customers from some of Nokia’s closest rivals.

“You use [MantaRay SON] for optimizing network performance from various angles,” Uitto said during a press briefing at Nokia’s research facility in Oulu, Finland. “It can be the downlink speed, the uplink speed, latency, or energy efficiency … it’s even used by some die-hard Ericsson customers who have 100 percent Ericsson radios, but they use it to manage the Ericsson radios.”

That Ericsson dig is significant as Nokia’s Nordic rival has made significant strides in the market.

AT&T recently deployed a third-party rApp running on Ericsson’s SMO platform on the carrier’s live production network. That rApp used the O-RAN Alliance R1 interface, which allowed it to communicate with the SMO layer using open, standardized APIs and highlighted the potential of open standards in disrupting closed, single-vendor SON.

Stéphane Téral, chief analyst at Téral Research, explained to SDxCentral that AT&T is “at the forefront” of centralized SON development, with the Ericsson partnership part of its 5G RAN and RIC vision.

“Ericsson, long-time, Open RAN nay-sayer, was brought in by AT&T in December 2023 to lead the complex, thorny, and risky task of migrating AT&T’s two SONs and in-house RIC onto its Intelligent Automation Platform while onboarding third-party rApps," Téral explained. “This is the world’s first non–real–time RIC commercial deployment, which also confirms that Open RAN in a brownfield network is real, works, and delivers."

Nokia had run RIC interface trials with AT&T in early 2023, but the vendor has since been strategically removed from AT&T’s Open RAN deployment efforts.

RAN rival Samsung has also garnered RIC accolades, including a deal with Canadian operator Telus in deploying the first AI-powered RIC in that country and a multivendor deployment with Verizon earlier this year.