Nokia and Databricks Unveil Unified Data Platform for Multi-Cloud Autonomous Networks

Nokia and Databricks have announced the successful completion of a joint proof of concept (PoC) demonstrating a unified data platform designed to power AI-driven autonomous networks. This collaboration aims to simplify the complex and often fragmented data environments faced by telecommunication providers today. The core idea is to enable real-time analytics at massive scale, facilitating quicker decision-making, improving network performance, and streamlining operational efficiencies across diverse infrastructures. The engineering teams from both companies focused on a real-time performance management use case. They simulated analytics ingestion with the goal of rapidly scaling to match the demands of tier-1 operators in a cloud environment. A significant breakthrough from this work is the development of cross-platform data pipelines that can be created once and then deployed across different cloud environments or on-premise infrastructure without requiring modifications or complex recoding. This capability is vital for telecom operators who need to build and run data-driven services consistently across their varied IT landscapes. According to Oguz Sunay, CTO AI and Autonomous Networks at Nokia, enabling a common, flexible data platform across cloud environments will help operators accelerate the adoption of AI. This, in turn, will lead to more efficient, resilient, and sustainable networks. Nevash Pillay, Global Head of Telecommunications Industry at Databricks, echoed this sentiment, highlighting how the unified data platform can simplify operations and unlock the value of AI across various network domains, especially given the increasing complexity of modern telecom networks. The collaboration confirmed the joint architecture's ability to handle the massive scale and real-time ingestion speeds necessary to feed network data to AI agents. This is crucial for automated, cross-domain decision-making. Furthermore, the project showcased how AI can streamline operations through AI-powered creation of new data products. An intelligent data fabric agent can generate new data products using natural language prompts, request human validation, and automatically deploy the pipeline, significantly reducing manual effort and accelerating innovation. This agentic approach allows for dynamic data product creation on demand through agent-to-agent communication. Nokia and Databricks plan to continue their collaboration, focusing on enhancing autonomous network capabilities. Their goal is to help operators transition towards a future where AI applications can increasingly access, correlate, and act on large-scale network data in real time, thereby revolutionizing network management and service delivery.