After their first tie-up a year ago, Nokia and Kyndryl extended their partnership for three more years after they added more than 100 customers for automating factories using 5 G wireless networks.
Big technology firms have been partnering with telecom gear makers like Nokia to sell private 5 G networks to customers, mostly in the manufacturing business, but only a few companies are able to get any traction in the business that is expected to grow by billions of dollars every year.
Chris Johnson, head of Nokia's enterprise business, told Reuters that the business grew significantly last year with the number of customers and number of networks.
After the initial one, the companies said that some customers were coming back to put private networks into more of their factories.
In Dow Chemical's petrochemical processing plant in Texas, the private wireless network increased worker safety, enabled remote audio and video collaboration, personnel tracking, and vehicle telematics, the companies said.
Paul Savill, Kyndryl's global practice leader, said Dow is planning to expand the coverage to dozens of its factories.
Our pipeline is growing faster than it has been in the last 12 months, he said. We currently have over 100 customers that we're working with in the private wireless space in around 24 different countries. After being spun off from IBM in 2021, Kyndryl has focused on building its wireless network business and has signed several agreements with cloud providers.
The size of the global private 5 G network market is expected to reach $41.02 billion by the year 2030, from 1.38 billion in 2021, according to a study by Grand View Research.
The companies have also developed automated industrial drones that can monitor a site with different sensors such as identifying chemicals and video recognition as part of the surveillance.
While drones have not yet been deployed commercially yet, customers are showing interest in rugged, industrialized non-stop automated drone surveillance, Johnson said.