Nokia (News - Alert) and Xiaomi have just announced that they have signed a business collaboration agreement and a multi-year patent agreement, including a cross license to each company’s cellular standard essential patents. In the deal, Xiaomi also acquired patent assets from Nokia.
Nokia has been working to get involved in as many areas of technology as possible lately, and in doing so has teamed up with several different companies. Xiaomi was an obvious choice for Nokia to align itself with, as the company has a presence in over 30 countries and regions. Xiaomi is well known for its smartphones, which are said to be full of innovative new technologies at a reasonable price. Xiaomi also dabbles in the Internet of Things (IoT), which is an area of great interest to Nokia. In fact, Xiaomi’s Mi Ecosystem IoT platform has crossed 60 million connected devices, and there are now over 8 million daily active connected devices on the Mi Ecosystem platform.
Just by looking at the company’s interests, it’s plain to see why Nokia wanted to partner with Xiaomi. “Xiaomi is one of the world's leading smartphone manufacturers and we are delighted to have reached an agreement with them,” said Rajeev Suri (News - Alert), President & CEO of Nokia. “In addition to welcoming such a prominent global technology company to our family of patent licensees, we look forward to working together on a wide range of strategic projects.”
But what, exactly, are those strategic projects going to be? Under the terms of this agreement, Nokia will provide network infrastructure equipment designed to deliver the high capacity, low power requirements expected by large Web providers and data center operators. According to the announcement, “Nokia and Xiaomi will work together on optical transport solutions for datacenter interconnect, IP Routing based on Nokia's newly announced FP4 network processor, and a data center fabric solution. In addition, the companies have agreed to explore opportunities for further cooperation, in areas such as Internet of Things, augmented and virtual reality, and artificial intelligence.”
This partnership seems like a successful endeavor for both companies. With Nokia and Xiaomi both having such strong interested in IoT, AI, VR and AR, we’re bound to see some great, innovative new ideas coming out of this team.
Edited by
Maurice Nagle
