Japanese telco NTT’s Business Solutions unit, part of NTT West Group, is working with Microsoft Azure and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). The three business are bringing hybrid cloud to NTT’s Regional Revitalization Cloud, they announced.
HPE GreenLake is an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform from HPE. Microsoft Azure Stack is a portfolio of hybrid cloud build and deployment tools. The edge-to-cloud solution offers Azure-based services on premise, in colocation facilities, and data centers.
NTT Business Solutions’ Regional Revitalization Cloud modernizes the regional Information and Communications Technology (ICT) infrastructure. NTT sees cloud computing as a vehicle to help business grow and prosper. But the initiative is equally focused on digital transformation for Japanese prefectural government and Japan’s educational sector.
The goal is “to solve regional issues and help businesses and institutions accelerate their digital transformation,” according to a statement from HPE.
Data sovereignty is top of mind for businesses moving to the cloud. The combined solution alleviates those concerns. “… Critical data are located close to the end customer,” said HPE.
Hybrid cloud solution helps NTT ‘invest efficiently’
GreenLake’s pay as you go consumption model helps NTT Business grow the initiative efficiently, said Hidenori Kigami, NTT business solutions executive officer, value design department.
“We have selected the HPE GreenLake platform because it accelerates our customers’ digital transformation and quickly scales performance and capacity to meet our customers’ business demands. HPE GreenLake allows us to pay for what we use so we can accurately match our costs to revenue, and we can invest efficiently to expand the regional revitalization cloud,” said Kigami.
The cloud program targets digital transformation initiatives at regional governments, Japan’s educational sector, and business and enterprise. NTT calls the effort a “regional information integration platform.”
The initiative weaves synergies between NTT West business units, consulting services, and local community partners. It’s part of a broader national digital transformation effort led by NTT and its telecom competitors. Japan’s telcos will spend more than $14 billion to build out 5G, according to research.
Bringing hybrid cloud services to Japanese businesses is one step in NTT’s ICT efforts. Another important key to help Japanese ICT modernize is happening at NTT West’s corporate sibling, NTT DoCoMo. Efforts there are underway to globally accelerate 5G Open RAN adoption with a dozen other companies. NTT DoCoMo will package best-of-breed Open RAN solutions from partners including Mavenir, Dell and Wind River. NTT then plans to sell the solutions to telcos worldwide.
