Nokia sells software units for €185m

As part of its ongoing efforts to restructure its Cloud and Network Services (CNS) division, Nokia has agreed to the sale of its device management and service management platform businesses to Lumine Group in a deal valued at €185 million.

The sale, which is due to be finalised during the first quarter of 2024, will involve the transfer of about 500 staff from Nokia to Lumine, which has been building up a broad portfolio of communications networking software systems as a result of multiple acquisitions for several years.

The device management tools help communication service providers (CSPs) remotely manage broadband customer premises equipment (CPE) units and other devices, such as IoT sensors, while the service management platform is used to monitor service performance for customer care purposes: Nokia says the software is being used in more than 150 deployments worldwide.

Group President at Lumine Group, David Sharpley, noted: “We are thrilled to welcome device management and service management platform customers and employees to Lumine. Consistent with our autonomous operating model, we will be reviving the heritage Motive brand for this new standalone Lumine company and we look forward to partnering with Nokia to ensure operational continuity with all customers.”

As part of the “active portfolio management” of the CNS division, Nokia had previously offloaded its cloud platform (CloudBand), container services and core network application development resources and staff (about 350 employees) transfer to Red Hat, and sold its VitalQIP DDI products to Cygna Labs in May: DDI comprises domain name system (DNS), dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP) and IP address management (IPAM) tools.

News of the divestment comes as Nokia seeks ways to cut costs to meet its financial targets: The vendor announced in October that it was cutting up to 14,000 jobs as part of a company-wide restructuring process and was forced to revamp its medium-term financial targets recently following the loss of its radio access network (RAN) business at AT&T.