Streamlining digital operations of its clients and by expanding product portfolio, NTT aims to offer single-window, end-to-end management of its clients’ entire cloud requirements
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“NTT is proactively working towards not only providing the best technologies, but also high-quality learning and skill upgrade opportunities for the employees.”
Karan Kirpalani,
Cloud Head,
NTT India
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The Cloud industry has been gaining momentum over the last several years. But the Pandemic and the ensuing shift to online operations and massive adoption of work-from-home-culture and online learning gave it a much needed shot in the arm. As the India market remains in the eye of a major digital transformation buoyed by a tech-centred Union Budget, SME Channels embarks upon recording the voices of the who’s who of the Cloud scape.
As part of our effort to make the voices of major cloud players heard by the channel community, we have brought in this for you as first of a series of Cloud Predictions by major vendors.
In a special interaction with SME Channels, Karan Kirpalani, Cloud Head, NTT India, reveals his organization’s strategy for growing the cloud industry, his predictions for the industry in 2022 and his vision and plans for the channel community. Edited excerpts…
The pandemic has forced businesses to take a giant leap to go online. As a leading cloud player, how do you plan to leverage the immense market opportunity created by the pandemic?
The need for digital transformation across verticals and industries has led to an unprecedented surge in demand for various services and products. The need of the hour is to ensure deployment of tools and technologies that ensure continuation of business operations, even in the wake of something like a lockdown. This is where online working, secure digital access to employees, vendors, and other stakeholders from any device, any location, data security, and adequate cloud-based storage and tools become crucial. The large organizations especially those dealing with sensitive consumer data, require protection from cybercrimes which have also surged in proportion and sophistication both. Unlike the past when only IT or technology companies required end-to-end digitization or digital support, today, even the startups or SMEs across non-IT sectors also need digital infrastructure and latest cloud technologies for their operations.
To serve our clients, and leverage the changing dynamics for our business growth, we have created several new solutions, and enhanced our earlier offerings. These include:
- Cloud based security for uniform network security protection of data and applications across multiple clouds
- Management of risks throughout the application lifecycle, through code audits and regular vulnerability analysis
- Data Center services
- SDWAN Services
- Virtual Private Network
- Content Delivery Network
- IoT Platform
- Data Center Services
Our aim is to offer single-window, end-to-end management of an organization’s entire cloud and digital technology requirements. We are streamlining digital operations and contributing to the growth of thousands of our clients. We continue to expand our product portfolio to gain greater market coverage.
As a major cloud player, what market trends do you foresee in 2022?
Cloud computing is rapidly evolving in the post-pandemic scenario. There are certain trends and practices that will dominate the market in 2022, and the years that follow. For instance:
- Microservices that will make innovation more affordable and simpler would gain popularity
- AI in cloud computing will become the new norm in cloud environments. Most of the regular AI usage such as Instagram filters or Google search etc, is already cloud-native, and this will become the standard practice
- Hybrid cloud adoption will rise, leading to the blurring of line between private and public cloud
- Cloud users are going to become sustainability conscious. The climate change concerns are dominating the conversations and the planet’s future is keenly debated. In such a context, we will see sustainability of cloud practices become a major discussion topic in 2022.
Please shed some light on your cloud offerings.
We have one of the most extensive ranges of cloud offerings that help businesses manage all their cloud needs in an easy single-vendor manner. These include:
- A managed, secure Hybrid Cloud that allows clients the freedom to select the private or public cloud platform that best suits their business needs
- Container environments that democratize cloud adoption across all businesses, small or large by eliminating the need to worry about infrastructure maintenance and upgrade
- Managed Cloud Security that enables our clients to focus solely on their business growth while we take care of 24/7, reliable, global standard security and compliances
- Enterprise cloud migration to facilitate end-to-end review, planning and seamless implementation of cloud migration with least downtime, and security risks
- Single window management of entire legacy and cloud IT systems to optimize the environment and operations
We offer products and services that fully support the latest global technologies such as industry standard APIs, OpenStack, bare metal configurations, etc.
What is the USP of your offerings?
As the leading provider of data center, cloud, networking and other related ICT infrastructure services, NTT offers a unique and the most extensive network of advanced infrastructure and tools in the world. We have built an end-to-end state-of-the-art infrastructure that combines premiere global data centers, a high-capacity, low latency Tier-1 IP backbone, and worldwide 24/7 operational support for our clients.
What major channel trends for cloud would you forecast for the year 2022?
Already answered in the first question
What all a channel partner needs to have to adopt cloud business and what are the steps to start cloud practice?
A client partner would need to have the skills to build, migrate and manage clients’ cloud and application workloads. Organizations are moving en masse to hybrid cloud environments, which would necessitate that the channel partner need to have solution architects skilled across multiple public and private cloud technologies to help clients build these solutions.
They’d also need to have the skills to migrate clients from existing platforms to new ones, and the skills to manage hybrid cloud environments post-migration.
Would you please brief us on the kind of service support you extend to your channel partners?
Answered in the question below.
What sort of pre as well as post-sales support do you offer to your partners?
We work with our partners to ensure that their go-to-market is as complete as possible. This doesn’t just include technical training for NTT hybrid cloud services, but also includes equipping our partners with the tools and technologies they need to be successful as cloud solution providers. NTT provides a comprehensive partner portal that allows partners to onboard, manage and monetize their clients’ infrastructure and operations. We also work closely with our partners on their GTM activities – such as running product- or partner-specific campaigns, sharing leads with our partners and helping them convert these opportunities into closures.
Since cloud is a tech-intensive product, it requires proper skilling. Please detail us on the training programs offered by you to upskill your partners.
The rapid surge in digitization and demand for digital solutions has created an incredible need for skilled teams among our channel partners that can take care of the demand. This is where NTT is proactively working towards not only providing the best technologies, but also high-quality learning and skill upgrade opportunities for the employees. We are focusing on an ecosystem growth where skills of the channel partners’ employees are upgraded and they are ready to deliver the same world-class experience to their clientele that NTT is renowned for.
