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

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 and Amazon.com.

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 today in San Francisco at the OracleWorld conference, the Wall Street Journal 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's mapping service.

Reuters