• Nokia Enterprise Edge Charging software solution targeting smart cities, utilities, and railway verticals

Nokia launched the Enterprise Edge Charging software solution to drivenew monetization capabilities for smart cities, utilities, and railway verticals, as part of the company’s ongoing strategic push into expanding its leadership position in the enterprise sector.

Using AI and machine learning, Enterprise Edge Charging gives enterprises more control over network data that is processed and analysed at the edge, reducing processing costs and improving the customer experience by avoiding the slower latency that typically results when data needs to be sent to a far-away centralized data center.

Enterprise Edge Charging has an intuitive user interface to quickly create new pricing and market offers, thereby reducing the time and cost required to set up and transact new commercial opportunities. The solution is designed around a microservices based architecture that can bedeployed in any cloud and infrastructure environment.

It can be sold direct to an enterprise or public sector entity focused on monetizing their NCES (Nokia Enterprise Core Solutions) private wireless 5G network; or other vendor private wireless networks. Enterprise Edge Charging can also be sold to a communication service provider (CSP), which can charge their enterprise customers. The solution is expected to be commercially available by the end of the year.

Enterprise Edge Charging also comes equipped with Nokia’s Monetization Manager, which increases rating and charging flexibility, and accuracy; and moves beyond the traditional charging capabilities into the billing domain.

Nokia’s charging solutions support leading CSPs around the world, with over 1 billion subscribers.In May, Nokia announced new, optimized Core Network software solutions for the field and wide area network (FAN/WAN) needs of public safety and power utilities.

John Abraham, Principal Analyst at Appledore, said: “Nokia’s Enterprise Edge Charging software is a significant announcement as it allows CSPs and enterprises to charge for services at the edge. This enables greater control and efficient charging for traditionally low business value devices and is quite timely given that 5G advanced, edge services and IoT applications are on the rise.”

Jonah Pransky, Head of Charging Business Line, Cloud and Network Services at Nokiasaid: “With more and more network functions moving to the edge, our new solution better positions Enterprises and CSPs to more flexibly and cost efficiently capitalize on network monetization opportunities and to better address their customers’ evolving needs.”