This week, APPLEDORE RESEARCH GROUP attended NOKIA’s Global Analyst Event, the first since the merger of Alcatel-Lucent into the NOKIA family. Approximately 40 analysts arrived outside Helsinki, Finland for two days of presentations, demos, 1:1 briefings, deep dives with experts, and of course, beautiful Finnish summer. Kicked off by NOKIA’s CEO, Rajeev Suri, this event began with a very positive commentary on the synergies provided by NOKIA’s and ALU’s complementary product strengths, technologies, and customer bases, and pointed to strong margin performance and quality metrics – which are often difficult to achieve during the process of integrating two large firms. Suri went on to paint a broad picture of the industry’s direction, and NOKIA’s position in it, describing a future of vastly increasing capacity demands, the need for low latency (~ 1 mS), order-of-magnitude increase in devices (many of them “things”) and falling ARPU (again, a result of simple “things”). NOKIA he says, is moving to deliver a network architecture that can meet these often conflicting demands based on a broad array of “5G” technologies, a highly distributed cloud architecture that pushes processing closer to the devices (latency, performance), and a “network operating system” that abstracts network functionality and exposes […]