MWC, Barcelona: UK-headquartered NTT has announced a go-to-market deal with energy management and automation specialist Schneider Electric to combine private 5G with the French firm’s ‘modular data centre’ proposition. They are pitching to industrial firms with large factories and remote sites. The solution uses Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure platform; NTT is bundling 5G from Celona.
The whole proposition is shot-through with IoT monitoring tech. The pair has installed the connectivity-and-compute bundle across a 30-hectare (74-acre) multi-tenant industrial campus at Marienpark Berlin, in the German capital. Since last year, they have been rolling out private 5G across Schneider Electric’s ‘smart factories’ in the US, notably its Lexington Smart Factory site.
The project was well covered in RCR Wireless, and billed as a model for private 5G to scale. NTT has been delivering private 5G, from Celona and also Cisco (and from Nokia in more ad-hoc fashion) via both its NTT DATA and NTT Limited divisions; the two units are being united as a single system integration and services business.
At heart, the deal between NTT and Schneider Electric is a sales partnership, which will see the two companies gain access for their respective private 5G and modular computing products to a large roster of major industrial firms. The EcoStruxure platform is a data-centre in a shipping container, effectively, with power, climate control, and other functions incorporated.
It can be shipped, fully specified, to brownfield industrial sites. NTT is providing an edge management service to the whole network-and-compute bundle, as it goes to enterprises. A press statement made note of the corporate drive on generative AI applications, and the ability of private cellular and edge servers to handle its “unparalleled connectivity and… computational demands”.
NTT has highlighted a number of high-profile private 5G wins in a new blog post, including most recently at the RAI Amsterdam event venue in the Netherlands, plus with chemicals companies Albemarle and LyondellBasell in the US, the City of Las Vegas in the US, auto-maker BMW in Germany, and Cologne and Frankfurt airports in Germany.
The firm has a “$500 million pipeline of opportunities with some of the world’s most disruptive brands”, it claims. It quoted Global Market Insights that the private 5G market will reach $42 billion in global revenue by 2032, up by 40 percent from 2024, with particular growth in manufacturing, healthcare, logistics, and smart cities.
NTT DATA’s own market analysis says 86 percent of firms are “gearing up to embrace private 5G”. Shahid Ahmed, executive vice president of new ventures and innovation at NTT Ltd, writes: “What sets NTT DATA apart is our fully integrated managed solution that fits seamlessly into an organisation’s existing IT infrastructure. Our private LTE/5G… solution is unique.”
Speaking of the Schneider Electric tie-up, Ahmed said: “Processing vast amounts of data generated by edge devices is where the future of digital transformation lies… We have the solution to meet these obstacles and are ready to lead the way towards a more connected and efficient digital world.”
Rob McKernan, president of Schneider Electric’s cloud and service provider division, said: “After leveraging NTT DATA’s expertise in private 5G connectivity and then maximising synergies with our EcoStruxure architecture in our facilities, it’s time to expand our collaboration… We aim to assist global clients in adopting connected devices, specialised industrial solutions and the right edge computing infrastructure with modular data centres to gain valuable data insights, particularly in the context of IoT and emerging AI requirements.”
