Did anyone know that Nokia had mapping software? This amazing discovery in the world of technology came to light yesterday at the user’s conference held in San Francisco. Oracle Corp. and Nokia Corp. announced a deal yesterday under which Oracle gets to make use of the mapping, navigation and location technology of Nokia. This software will be utilized by Oracle to include mapping capabilities to its software offerings.
Nokia_Map
According to reports, Nokia had paid somewhere around 8.1 billion dollars to Navteq (a mapping company) in the year 2007 to acquire this mapping technology. However, it did virtually nothing with it since then. The Wall Street Journal reports that in 2011 Nokia’s total revenue from its service business wasn’t much. Rather it was a scanty 1.2 billion dollars. As far as this deal with Oracle is concerned, then it’s not expected to add anything much in the way of revenue. Nevertheless, everyone’s obviously got the impression that this move is intended to polish up Nokia’s image as a provider of mapping and location services as well as other software services generally.
In the world of technology, Google is undoubtedly considered the mapping leader. Challenging this colossal presence isn’t really going to help either Nokia’s stature or revenue. In fact, Nokia has struck more than one mapping deal with a few other companies like Yahoo! Inc., Groupon Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. However, these deals have been almost unseen. Moreover, there’s an entire range of products available for mapping apps by Nokia from Microsoft Corp. Though Apple Inc.’s attempt to include its own map to iOS 6 spelled disaster, yet it wouldn’t really be wise to bet that the company won’t be able to fix the problems.
After all, it isn’t just maps that are the only important thing. Add to that the location services. When that function is added to application technology like that of Oracle, then this turns out to be a winning game for Oracle.
