Nokia has launched a blockchain-powered data marketplace for secure data trading and AI models in transportation, logistics, energy, smart cities and healthcare.

It is designed to enable trusted exchanges and monetisation of data via private blockchain, and should accelerate initiatives in AI and machine learning through federated learning.

Finland-based Nokia has launched the marketplace as-a-service to facilitate secure sharing of data and AI models, enabling digital transformation and data monetisation for enterprises.

As data volumes continue to surge, AI and machine learning are increasingly crucial in business decision making. The marketplace is designed to help enterprises and communications service providers (CSPs) use data in strategic decision making, by providing real-time access to massive trusted datasets.

The service also enables enterprises and CSPs to become data marketplace providers themselves, by monetising data exchanges between customers or business ecosystem participants.

The marketplace ensures trusted data exchange and authorisation mechanisms. This enables a wide range of vertical use cases, including electric vehicle charging, environmental data monetisation, supply-chain automation and preventative maintenance powering numerous vertical segments, including transportation, ports, energy, smart cities and healthcare.

“Our customers need secure and trusted access to data for effective business decision making,” said Friedrich Trawoeger, vice president at Nokia. “With Nokia Data Marketplace, enterprises and CSPs can now benefit from richer insights and predictive models to drive digital ways of working and tap into new revenue streams.”

The marketplace can accelerate AI initiatives through federated learning. This approach, combined with orchestration capabilities, facilitates collaborative development of accurate machine-learning models for analytics use cases. It also meets growing demand for a platform that can efficiently apply AI and machine-learning algorithms to in situ data.

This complements Nokia’s Wing worldwide IoT network grid, which offers global IoT connectivity and vertical applications. For example, Wing’s asset tracking can be enriched by Data Marketplace’s blockchain to provide secure and automated data exchange and transactions between logistics’ ecosystem partners for faster turnaround.

“Through automated data exchange among shipping participants, Nokia brings us the transparency and operational efficiency required in our global marine supply chain,” said Wouter van Neerbos, CEO at Marlin. “This reduces waiting time for shipping participants in the marine ecosystem, enables faster turnaround for ships, and reduces our costs.”

Kaladhar Voruganti, senior fellow at Equinix, added: “Nokia Data Marketplace combined with Equinix data centres allows organisations to share data and algorithms globally at more than 240 metro edge locations. Our Metal platform augments this to provide secure, proximate, on-demand infrastructure to enterprises and government agencies. Sharing and processing of data close to its point of creation mitigates issues related to latency, compliance and network backhaul cost. These neutral and secure edge locations are connected via high-speed and secure networks to data sources spanning across public clouds, private enterprise data centres and data brokers.”