Nokia, Oracle to announce mapping deal

Phone maker Nokia Oyj will announce on Monday a deal that will give Oracle Corp's customers access to its mapping services, Nokia said on Monday.

Finland's Nokia, 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.

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.

"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 and broadens the large enterprise market for Nokia's location services," said analyst Martin Garner from British consultancy CCS Insight.

In stark contrast with Nokia's troubled phone business, sales at Nokia's location business grew last quarter, although it still generates only 4 per cent of group revenue.

Details of the deal may be unveiled later on Monday in San Francisco at the OracleWorld conference, the Wall Street Journal said.

Last week Apple publicly apologized 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.