Nokia launches SaaS services to tackle energy consumption and home device management

Nokia has announced two new Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings, aimed at helping communication service providers (CSPs) and enterprise customers reduce energy consumption across their networks and automate device management control for smart home devices.

The first, dubbed Nokia Analytics Virtualization and Automation (AVA) for Energy SaaS uses artificial intelligence to monitor network traffic and help reduce the amount of connectivity resources used during periods of low demand. It also looks to spot network anomalies and benchmark the energy efficiency of passive infrastructure, such as batteries and power supplies. Nokia says AVA for Energy SaaS can help CSPs achieve up to five-fold energy savings.

The second, Nokia Home Device Management SaaS, is a device management platform for smart home devices. The vendor-agnostic tool allows CSP and enterprise customers to remotely monitor and manage fleets of smart home devices, including routers, Wi-Fi extenders, mesh nodes, video set top boxes, voice over IP access devices, and 4G/5G fixed wireless access devices.

Nokia has also announced the commercial availability of Anomaly Detection SaaS, a machine learning-powered network anomaly detection tool which was first announced in November 2021.

Rohit Mehra, group vice president for network and telecommunications at IDC, said that the announcements from Nokia are interesting enhancements that will help its customers improve their network operations.

“Capabilities like energy efficiency monitoring are top of mind these days for operators and enterprises alike, as are issues pertaining to home device monitoring and management,” he told Network World.

Mehra added that while it makes sense to be somewhat skeptical of the claims related to artificial intelligence or machine learning-powered platform enhancements, most service providers have now started to embrace a pragmatic approach to leveraging these types of capabilities to improve their security posture and network operations.