BARCELONA—Entering its 150th year, a revamped Nokia has big plans for a programmable future.
On stage at Mobile World Congress here, Nokia CEO Rajeev Suri outlined the company's plan for a world of connected people and things.
"There is a world of opportunity ahead of us," Suri said on Sunday, suggesting that "software holds all connections together."
"We see technology evolving to a point where almost all people and billions and billions of devices—50 billion or more by 2025—are connected," Suri said in a statement. "Where software holds all those connections together, where analytics bring meaning, and where automation brings simplicity and efficiency."
Those connections include Nokia's new predictive marketing solution, which aims to change the way mobile operators approach digital marketing.
"This is my favorite for two reasons," Suri said on Sunday. The first, he explained, is the union of Nokia Networks and HERE, which work together to create new marketing capabilities, and allows operators more insight into customers' service experiences.
Calling the new service "a small taste of what the renewed Nokia can do," Suri also touched on its capacity to help customers sell more, which he said has "never been a strength of other major infrastructure vendors."
"We have something totally unique," he said of the cloud-based program, which, in early testing, helped a client generate hundreds of millions of Euros in new revenue.
Nokia sold its handset business in 2013 to Microsoft for $7.2 billion. Redmond has since rebranded its phone business as Microsoft Lumia.
"We are living in an incredibly exciting time," Suri told a crowd of press and analysts over the weekend. "The possibilities ahead of us are extraordinary. We stand at a point where what we do can make people's lives better, safer, easier, and our planet cleaner."