Nokia launches Data Marketplace 'as-a-service'

• Nokia launches data marketplace for secure data trading and AI models
• Will enable trusted exchanges and monetization of data via private blockchain
• Nokia says it will provide real-time access to massive trusted datasets

Nokia today announced the launch of Nokia Data Marketplace as-a-service.  The idea is to facilitate the sharing of (mostly) CSP and allied data sets for better analysis and decision making by (mostly) CSPs. Nokia says it’s designed to help enterprises use data in strategic decision making by providing access to more data sets which can be used to enrich the results  -  basically, with AI it seems the more quality data you can get hold of to feed it, the better. 

“It became clear to us over the last 2 or 3 years when we introduced a lot of AI and machine learning, that there was a huge belt of data being produced by customers that would never be used for anything other than tracking the performance of the network or for monitoring a particular service,” explained Friedrich Trawoeger, Vice President, Cloud and Cognitive Services at Nokia. “Our customers need secure and trusted access to data for effective business decisions and we realised that the data could easily be marketed, so we talked to some other  customers and they were very much interested.”

The Nokia Data Marketplace was the result. Nokia claims it will essentially accelerate AI initiatives through federated learning. This approach, combined with orchestration capabilities, facilitates collaborative development of highly accurate machine learning models for analytics use cases. It also meets growing demand for a platform that can efficiently apply AI and machine learning algorithms to in-situ data.

Nokia thinks the new service will also also enable enterprises and CSPs to become data marketplace providers themselves, by monetizing data exchanges between customers or business ecosystem participants.

The Nokia Data Marketplace is also combined with Equinix data centers, allowing organizations to share data and algorithms globally at more than 240 metro edge locations, and Nokia says it complements its global IoT Network Grid (WING) where blockchain is used to provide secure and automated data exchange and transactions between logistics ecosystem partners for faster turnaround. 

Friedrich Trawoeger describes the ‘snowballing’ effect that tends to occur once you start thinking about how various data sets can be cross-correlated. 

“So you have a location based data volume,” he says. “You have a string of data showing how many of the customers are in one spot at one time, how many are there, what are they doing. So to market it you characterise and contextualise the data and then expose it with its attributes on the marketplace.”

Location data, for instance, can be enriched with other data sets to give insights, while other customers have infrastructure which might  produce data that can be coupled with environmental measurements, for instance. “We see demand from smart cities, retail stores, even maritime organisations,” he says.

“We start with network centric, service centric location centric data. And then we extend outwards.”

Fredrich says the Data Marketplace announcement was made early today (Weds, May 5)  “and in the last couple of hours companies have contacted me from all around the world.” There’s clearly a demand.