Nokia maps to power Oracle customers

Nokia Oyj has agreed to give Oracle Corp's customers access to its mapping products, as the mobile phone company seeks to expand its location services business.

The Finnish company, which bought the world's largest digital mapping firm, Navteq, in 2008, has been looking for ways to boost the business and recently signed mapping deals with Groupon Inc and Amazon.Com Inc.

In stark contrast with Nokia's troubled mobile phone operation, sales at the location business grew last quarter, though it still generates only 4 percent of group revenue.

Oracle has developed a link between its own software and the Nokia Location Platform software, Nokia said on Monday. This enables the U.S. company's business users to access the mapping services through its products.

Financial details of the deal were not disclosed, but Nokia said Oracle users would licence Location Platform from Nokia for use in Oracle applications.

"Nokia has been on a mission for the last 18 months to sign mapping and location deals with large Internet players. The deal with Oracle extends this," CCS Insight analyst Martin Garner said.

Last week Apple publicly apologised after customer complaints about errors in its maps, which have been put on its latest phone operating system instead of Google Inc's mapping service.

Oracle is the world's third-biggest software firm but also sells hardware to corporate clients and in 2009 bought Sun Microsystems, the manufacturer of server computers and developer of Java and Solaris software.

Copyright Thomson Reuters 2012