New NTT Communications CEO Tetsuya Shoji is picking up where his predecessor left off by pursuing the aggressive expansion of the telco’s cloud business, in particular its data centre footprint.
Shoji has spent 38 years working for NTT Group. He moved over to NTT Communications in 2012, succeeding Akira Arima as chief executive of the company on 19 June 2015. During his first press conference in London on Thursday, Shoji discussed an important source of motivation.
"I’m a big fan of motor sport, especially Formula 1," he said. "My motto is taken from [world champion racing driver] Mario Andretti. He said: ‘if everything seems under control, you are not going fast enough’."
With that in mind, Shoji disclosed that NTT Com is close to acquiring a data centre company in Indonesia. Details of the target and the transaction are still under wraps, but the deal will help NTT Com address Indonesian enterprises, and provide redundancy and resilience in what is a seismically active region.
NTT Com spent several years looking for land and real estate so it could build its own data centre, "but we came to the conclusion that it was quicker to buy an existing player," Shoji explained.
The dust has barely settled on NTT Com’s last major acquisition in the data centre space, Germany’s e-shelter.
That deal, announced on 23 June, increased NTT Com’s European data centre footprint to 92,000 square metres from 19,500 square metres. In recent years the company has also bought data centre providers in Thailand and the U.S.
NTT Com is also putting the finishing touches to a new data centre in Hemel Hempstead, on the northern outskirts of London in the U.K. It is due to go live in November.
"We are expanding our global footp rint because it is important to be close to our customers," Shoji said, emphasising the need to abide by local regulations governing data storage, privacy, and security, and for the simple fact that it helps to be able to speak the local language.
"Enterprise cloud is as much about people as it is about technology," he said. "Enterprises are trusting us with their reputation…We want to earn this respect."
In December NTT Com plans to launch a new enterprise cloud platform that will use software-defined networking (SDN) to enable customers to manage their public, private hosted, and private on-site clouds as if they were all one and the same cloud.
"We have been using SDN for many years" in our own organisation, said Shoji. Now is the right time to make several features available to NTT Com’s enterprise customers, he said.
As well as cloud infrastructure and services, NTT Com is also building up its experience in the Internet of Things (IoT) and machine-to-machine (M2M) markets.
The company is field testing wearable sensors in partnership with Japanese construction firm Obayashi that monitors workers’ vital signs in a bid to improve safety. It is also working on a connected car service with Toyota; however, Shoji said details of that project are confidential.
It appears on first impressions then that Shoji is being true to his hero Mario Andretti’s motto by maintaining the pace of NTT Com’s development.
"It is an interesting time to get into the driver’s seat," he said.
