Nokia has signed a multi-year agreement to deepen its commitment to RISE with SAP, choosing Microsoft Azure as the cloud foundation to run its SAP S/4HANA environment. The deal, announced by SAP on July 1, 2026, marks a major step in the telecom giant’s plan to modernize its core enterprise resource planning systems and prepare for an AI-driven future. By moving its most critical business processes to SAP’s managed cloud offering on Azure, Nokia gains a more flexible, intelligent, and continuously updated ERP backbone—one capable of supporting its global operations and digital ambitions.
SAP launched RISE with SAP in 2021 as a holistic cloud transformation package. It bundles SAP S/4HANA Cloud, business process intelligence, the SAP Business Technology Platform, and a single service-level agreement covering all components. For companies still running legacy on-premise ECC implementations, RISE provides a guided path to a clean-core, cloud-native ERP without the overhead of managing infrastructure. Nokia, which has been an SAP customer for decades, is now accelerating that journey. Although the financial terms remain undisclosed, the multi-year structure signals a strategic lock-in with both SAP and Microsoft, leveraging Azure’s global footprint and advanced services.
Nokia’s decision to run S/4HANA on Azure places it at the intersection of two of the enterprise world’s longest-standing partnerships. SAP and Microsoft have been tightening their collaboration since the Embrace initiative in 2019, co-engineering solutions and aligning roadmaps. Today, Azure is one of the largest hyperscaler platforms for SAP workloads, supporting thousands of production instances globally. The partnership goes beyond infrastructure: customers can integrate Office 365, Teams, and Power Platform directly with SAP data, all secured by Microsoft Entra ID. For Nokia, this means the ERP environment will natively connect with the productivity and collaboration tools already in use across its workforce of over 86,000 employees.
The shift to Azure under RISE with SAP addresses more than a simple infrastructure upgrade. It gives Nokia access to a continuous innovation pipeline. By adopting SAP’s clean-core methodology, the company can minimize custom code that often bogs down upgrades and complicates compliance. Instead, it will use SAP Business Technology Platform for extensions and cloud-native apps. This architectural shift is critical for a 155-year-old company that has reinvented itself multiple times—from paper to rubber to mobile phones and now network infrastructure. A modern ERP is not a back-office utility; it is the digital nerve center for supply chain, finance, procurement, and customer operations across over 130 countries.
News of the deal comes as enterprises face growing pressure to embed AI into their core processes. S/4HANA 2023 and subsequent releases have introduced embedded AI capabilities—predictive analytics, intelligent invoice matching, automated payment processes, and conversational AI through SAP’s Joule copilot. Running on Azure unlocks additional AI services. Microsoft’s ecosystem of pre-trained models, Azure OpenAI Service, and cognitive APIs can be combined with SAP data to build sophisticated automations. For instance, Nokia could deploy large language models to query procurement contracts, generate demand forecasts from live IoT data, or automate dispute resolution in finance—all within a governed, secure environment.
From a technical standpoint, the RISE contract means Nokia’s SAP landscape will run on Azure Virtual Machine types certified for SAP HANA, including the latest Msv2 and Mdsv2 series with memory up to 12 TB. These instances support the massive in-memory databases typical of global enterprises. Azure’s availability zones, disaster recovery options, and dedicated ExpressRoute connections ensure the four- and five-nine SLAs that a telecom equipment supplier must have. And because Azure hosts all three major SAP deployment models—on-prem, RISE, and cloud-native—Nokia retains flexibility to evolve its workload distribution over the agreement’s lifespan.
By choosing a hyperscaler-managed cloud ERP, Nokia also sidesteps the tortuous upgrade cycles that have defined SAP’s past. RISE includes quarterly updates and continuous feature delivery, meaning the company will always be on a supported, modern version. The looming 2027 end-of-mainstream maintenance for SAP Business Suite 7 makes the timing particularly urgent. While it’s not confirmed that Nokia was running an older ECC system, the broad industry push to S/4HANA is undeniable. Early movers like Nokia gain a competitive edge by completing the transformation before the last-minute rush that will strain system integrator capacity and drive up costs.
Industry analysts see the deal as a bellwether. “When a global manufacturing and telecom player of Nokia’s scale chooses RISE on Azure, it validates the combined value proposition of SAP’s business transformation and Microsoft’s cloud platform,” said Paul Saunders, Chief Research Officer at CloudERP Insights. “This isn’t a lift-and-shift; it’s a fundamental re-architecture that will touch process design, data management, and the application landscape for years.” Indeed, Nokia will likely use the migration as an opportunity to standardize processes across its business units—Nokia Technologies, Network Infrastructure, Mobile Networks, and Cloud and Network Services—on a single global template.
The announcement also underscores the intensifying rivalry among cloud providers for SAP workloads. AWS and Google Cloud both offer certified infrastructure and have secured marquee RISE deals, but Microsoft’s advantage lies in the breadth of adjacent services. Azure Arc, for instance, extends Azure management to hybrid environments, which could be valuable as Nokia integrates edge computing with its 5G and private wireless solutions. A unified data estate on Azure—spanning ERP, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and custom apps—can feed a single analytics layer in Microsoft Fabric, opening the door to real-time, cross-functional insights.
For SAP, the Nokia win adds another household name to a growing list of RISE references that includes Mercedes-Benz, Siemens, and Unilever. The vendor has been aggressively moving its installed base to the cloud, reporting 41 percent year-over-year growth in current cloud backlog for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2025, reaching €15.8 billion. RISE with SAP contributes a significant share, and every new customer signals to the market that the subscription-based cloud model is supplanting perpetual licenses. Nokia’s conversion from a likely traditional license holder to a cloud subscriber therefore carries symbolic and financial weight.
Security and compliance are non-negotiable in the telecom sector, particularly for a company that engages with governments and critical national infrastructure. Azure provides more than 100 compliance offerings, including ISO 27001, SOC, and GDPR, and has obtained authorization for the highest classification levels in multiple countries. SAP’s own security-by-design approach and the clean-core principle further reduce the attack surface. For Nokia, protecting intellectual property around 5G patents and classified defense contracts is paramount, and the shared security model of SAP on Azure has been battle-tested by government agencies and defense contractors worldwide.
While the initial focus is the ERP migration, the partnership is likely to expand. RISE includes access to SAP’s Business Technology Platform, which Nokia can use to build side-by-side extensions using low-code/no-code tools, APIs, and integration suites. Combined with Microsoft Power Platform, business experts can create apps that bridge SAP data and Office 365 without deep coding skills. This capability addresses one of the perennial frustrations of ERP projects: the long tail of small, department-specific requirements that are too expensive to customize in the core.
Employees stand to benefit directly from a modern user experience. SAP Fiori frees workers from the green-screen interfaces of old SAP GUI, offering role-based, mobile-responsive apps. When connected with Microsoft Teams, embedded SAP data shows up directly in chat and collaboration spaces. A field engineer inspecting a cell tower can pull up the asset master, raise a purchase order for replacement parts, and log service hours from a single Teams mobile app—all while the ERP silently processes records in the background. This kind of integrated workflow can cut process cycle times by 40 to 60 percent, early adopters report.
The migration itself will be a multi-year program involving system integrators, internal change management, and data cleansing. Nokia will likely follow SAP’s prescribed methodology: discover, prepare, explore, realize, and run. The discover phase alone can take months for an organization of this size, mapping out the current SAP instances, interfaces, and custom objects. The “keep-the-core-clean” mantra demands that Nokia only bring forward customizations that are truly business-differentiating, a discipline that requires strong executive sponsorship.
Financially, the move converts a large portion of Nokia’s IT spend from capital expenditure to operating expenditure. Cloud subscriptions are recognized monthly, smoothing out the budget peaks of traditional hardware refreshes every three to five years. The pay-as-you-go elasticity also means that during quiet financial periods, non-production systems can be scaled down, controlling costs. For a publicly traded company with a market capitalization of around €20 billion, such predictability supports earnings guidance.
Looking ahead, the AI possibilities are the most tantalizing. SAP’s announced plan to embed Joule across its entire portfolio by 2027 suggests that Nokia’s ERP will soon be able to engage in natural-language conversations. An executive could ask, “What are our top three supply-chain risks for the next quarter?” and receive an instant, data-backed summary. Microsoft Copilot for Azure can assist IT teams in monitoring SAP system health and predicting infrastructure issues before they cause downtime. These are not science-fiction scenarios; early previews have shown working prototypes in customer limited-release trials.
Skeptics, however, caution that the benefits of such megadeals depend heavily on execution. Complexity can spiral if Nokia’s SAP footprint is fragmented across acquired entities, each with custom configurations. The success of the project will hinge on Nokia’s ability to enforce a global template and resist the temptation to re-create old custom logic in the cloud. The company’s recent track record offers some reassurance: its digital transformation initiatives, including the adoption of SaaS for CRM and HR, have reduced data centers from over 50 to fewer than a dozen, saving hundreds of millions of euros.
For Microsoft and SAP, the Nokia deal is yet another proof point that their alliance can win against hyperscaler competitors. After the Embrace initiative, the two companies have deepened their co-selling and engineering collaboration. They recently unveiled the SAP Integration Suite on Azure, which simplifies connecting SAP to non-SAP systems on Azure. Nokia could be an early beneficiary, tying its ERP to the dozens of cloud applications it runs for engineering, manufacturing execution, and logistics.
The implications ripple beyond one company. Other large European manufacturers and telecoms still weighing S/4HANA migration will study Nokia’s approach. The choice to go all-in with RISE—rather than a purely infrastructure-as-a-service lift of ECC to Azure and then a later S/4HANA conversion—marks a preference for business transformation over infrastructure refresh. It also signals trust in SAP’s managed cloud, a model that has weathered early skepticism about data sovereignty and loss of control. As the 2027 deadline approaches, the Nokia blueprint may accelerate decision-making in boardrooms from Stuttgart to Stockholm.
In the immediate term, Nokia’s IT organization will begin the detailed planning and onboarding processes. SAP will assign a customer engagement manager and architect to guide the journey. Microsoft will provision the initial Azure landing zone and connectivity. Industry benchmarks suggest that a full greenfield S/4HANA implementation for a company of Nokia’s complexity can take 18 to 24 months, but RISE’s pre-configured content and best-practice accelerators aim to shorten that cycle. Whatever the exact timeline, the destination is clear: a single, intelligent, cloud-based ERP that can evolve at the pace of the business.
This announcement arrives at a pivotal moment for Nokia. As it invests heavily in 5G-Advanced and 6G research, back-office agility becomes a competitive asset. The ability to quickly integrate new acquisitions, spin off business units, or pivot supply chains in response to geopolitical shifts requires an ERP that doesn’t get in the way. With this multi-year RISE deal, Nokia is betting that the power of SAP’s business process intelligence, combined with the scale and AI prowess of Microsoft Azure, will deliver exactly that—an ERP that is not just a system of record, but a platform for continuous innovation.