Although it certainly doesn’t dominate the mobile phone market anymore, Nokia Corp. remains a leading player in the multibillion-dollar network equipment market.

The company set out to improve its position even further today by acquiring a Michigan-based startup called Deepfield Inc. that develops traffic analysis services. At the heart of its product lineup is Singularity, a monitoring engine that helps organizations track their networks using real-time operational data. The system collects information from internal switching equipment, applications and various external sources such as threat intelligence feeds.

Also on the list is Genome, a cloud analytics tool that constitutes another other core component of Deepfield’s value proposition. It can identify all the web services that a company’s employees use as part of their day-to-day work and measure how the traffic they generate affects network operations. Combined with the other data collected by Singularity, this information can help information technology departments find weaknesses in their infrastructure before they impact end-user productivity.

Nokia will pair Deepfield’s software with management automation systems such as its Network Services Platform to let customers perform optimizations without any manual work. A company looking to better support its branch locations, for instance, could use the technology to detect when a remote office is in need of more bandwidth and have the necessary resources allocated automatically. This capability is also useful for dealing with unexpected events such as distributed denial-of-service attacks that may hurt network performance if left unaddressed.

The final area where Nokia plans to apply Deepfield’s service is in its professional services business. According to today’s launch announcement, its support professionals will use the software to find problems in client networks and automate troubleshooting efforts.

The acquisition is expected to complete in the first quarter of 2017 pending the usual closing conditions. Nokia didn’t say how much the deal is worth, but the fact that Deepfield has raised over $3 million in funding provides reason to believe the price tag is at least in the seven-figure range.

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