Nokia officially kicked off its Mobility Hosting business today, lending a proper moniker to the platform it has been gradually building over the last year to challenge the growing outsourcing and hosting business of rival network vendor Ericsson.

Nokia capped the launch with a deal to host a push-to-talk over cellular (PoC) trial with Mobitel and Slovenia, which it adds to a previous PoC hosting contracts with 3 Scandinavia and Mobikom Austria, both announced last year. Even with those deals under its belt, Nokia has some catching up to do if it plans to come abreast of Ericsson. The Swedish vendor has been touting its hosting business for the last year, and has landed significant deals globally. In the U.S. Ericsson hosts everything from MMS to Web portals for nine Tier 2 operators, and in Europe its outsourcing business has skyrocketed with its recent contracts to take over the management of 3’s networks in the U.K. and Italy.

Nokia’s own professional services business is nothing to scoff at. Its hosted services portfolio coupled with its managed services has 39 contracts in 30 countries, Nokia officials claim, and accounts for 30% of all of Nokia’s network revenues. Nokia also said it is in hosting solutions talks with several more providers internationally.

In other news, Nokia today said it has signed an OEM agreement with RadioFrame Networks to resell the smaller vendor’s picocell architecture as part of its GSM/GPRS/EDGE portfolio. Designed to bring GSM coverage into a small or medium enterprise, the S-Series base station transceiver hooks back into the network through a standard DSL or cable broadband connection.