NTT Com Gives Firms Local Advantage in Fast-Growing Asian Markets
In step with the rapid expansion of Asian economies, especially those of China and India, NTT Com is leveraging its leadership and experience in information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure to meet the increasingly localized needs of multinational companies. Once production bases for major enterprises, China and India are proving to be attractive markets in their own right and many enterprises are now selling their goods and services locally. NTT Com can offer solutions that optimize their customers’ IT systems, allowing them to concentrate on their core businesses, says Kazutaka Kobayashi, senior manager, Corporate Sales Group, Global Business Division.
Promises and Challenges of Localization
With populations of 1.3 billion and 1.1 billion and GDP growth rates of 9.9% and 7.6% in 2005, respectively, China and India represent exciting new markets. In 2005, China was the world’s second-largest economy after the U.S. with a GDP of $8.8 trillion, while India’s GDP reached $3.6 trillion, according to CIA Factbook estimates. Reflecting their increasing presence on the global ICT stage, China’s international data transmission market shot up 29.2% last year, while India’s grew 13.5%, according to the Gartner Group.
It is this sort of promise that has given impetus to manufacturing and service enterprises to switch from using such countries as mere manufacturing bases to adapting their products and services for sale in these markets. This requires enterprises to implement inventory, production, sales, delivery and business processes tailored to each country’s conditions, which means a rising demand for management of local ICT infrastructure and business applications that support these processes.
NTT Com meets these demands with efficient, reliable network management and managed IT services. “The ICT infrastructure needed for localization requires an extremely broad range of skills. When companies localize, they need enterprise-level solutions that free them up to concentrate on their core activities. Successfully outsourcing ICT infrastructure needs offsets risks and helps them optimize their business. This is NTT Com’s critical role,” says Kobayashi.
Strengths as a Network Carrier
NTT Com’s closed networks, such as IP-VPN and Arcstar, provide high-quality service to more than 151 countries. In open networks, NTT Com is the only Tier 1 ISP in Asia, and its IP backbone has a capacity of 95 Gbps between Japan and the U.S., the largest in the world.
One of NTT Com’s key roles is to ensure the security and stability of its customers’ ICT infrastructure. In Asian scountries, local carriers’ connections between NTT Com’s international network nodes and customers’ offices tend to be less reliable, with line quality of 99.5-99.7% on average per month in 2004, according to NTT Com estimates. To improve access line quality, NTT Com has established the Arcstar Carrier Forum for Asian network carriers to enable participants to share information and know-how. This year, 13 overseas carriers and 11 NTT Com subsidiaries in nine countries (China, South Korea, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam) met in Tokyo from March 14-17. As a result of these forums, 70% of the participants had improved access line availability to 99.9% in 2005.
Managed IT Solutions for Enterprises
NTT Com’s managed IT solutions provide stable and efficient IT management for companies operating locally. These services include essential security and maintenance systems, antivirus and information-leak security tools, such as firewalls, and IDS/IPS and optimization, which require highly skilled engineering staff hired regionally.
NTT Com’s particular strength is its ability to offer complete, end-to-end solutions tailored to the needs of individual enterprises. A key feature is that NTT Com’s solutions cover everything from the terminals in one office in one country to those in counterpart offices in other countries. In other words, they provide unbroken linkage from customer-premises equipment and internal servers and network on one side of the enterprise’s ICT network through the gateway and router into NTT Com’s global network, and then back to offices in other countries. NTT Com thus offers enterprises without their own technical assets a complete range of ICT infrastructure, and for a convenient monthly charge. “When you think about it from the customer’s point of view, nearly every item of electronic equipment in the office is connected to the network. It’s an extremely reasonable value proposition to partner with us,” says Kobayashi.
NTT Com’s ICT infrastructure services are distinguished by comprehensive, unified operations and strict security. For example, the company’s unified network enables the IP backbone to be monitored globally and the origin of all data to be identified, so worm attacks and other threats can be detected quickly, before they spread. Since all access points on the network share the same operations and security models, users can depend on consistent end-to-end operations and security worldwide.
As a major electronics manufacturer in China found out, partnering with NTT Com means one-stop solutions for end-to-end ICT and security alike. With 40 offices, sales and production sites spread across China, each with its own set of Internet access protocols, the company found itself facing multiple security weaknesses, such as susceptibility to spam mail. But without the necessary infrastructure and resources, it could not afford to dispatch technicians to each site to fix each problem.
By setting up the Arcstar Global IP-VPN in each site via NTT Com’s Shanghai-based Data Center, however, the company not only integrated its ICT infrastructure for greater efficiency and lower costs, it also gained a 24-hour security management system that obviated needs for dispatching security technicians and upgrading hardware.
NTT Com has built a strong track record in helping companies optimize their ICT infrastructure in the most difficult of circumstances. For example, when a major Chinese manufacturer decided to set up production control and ordering applications worldwide to promote growth in its 20 overseas operations, it faced critical issues, including insufficient information on overseas offices’ ICT assets, such as PCs, because of lack of a centralized procurement policy; chronic delays in security updates; frequent server outages; and no local helpdesk functions, leading to massive drains on headquarters’ IT human resources. By establishing IT governance and implementing comprehensive operational guidelines and security policies, NTT Com was able to minimize the company’s ICT costs while optimizing its ICT assets and ensuring security. In fact, just in terms of PC use alone, the company was able to reduce operating costs by 30% annually.
Moving Even Deeper into India and China
NTT Com, in response to customer needs, is further expanding services in India and China. In India, NTT Com demonstrated its strong commitment to localization when it set up NTT Communications India Private Ltd. in September 2005, the only Japanese wholly owned telecom subsidiary in the country to date. The New Delhi-based company, which has branches in Mumbai and Bangalore, enables NTT Com to provide network integration and solution services on an unprecedented level in the local market.
Moreover, by working closely with local carriers and providers on a number of levels, NTT Com is ensuring that its services achieve the highest possible levels of stability and availability. For example, under a strategic partnership with VSNL, India's leading international carrier, NTT Com became the first Japanese company in India to launch a global IP-VPN (MPLS) service in May 2005. NTT Com has also signed an on-site router maintenance partnership with HCL, one of India’s top IT companies and a major system integrator. In addition, it has formed tie-ups with India’s leading telecom companies Tulip and Bharti.
Meanwhile, in China, NTT Com is now aggressively localizing its broad-based skills and experience in anaged IT services, offering even deeper and more comprehensive services that provide greater value, convenience, security and reliability for its more than 1,000 corporate customers in the country. NTT Com plans to establish a customer service center in Dalian in October to leverage its leadership in China’s highly competitive managed IT service sector.
To respond to the growing problem of information leaks at the Asian operations bases of multinational companies, NTT Com added a new security service in China last March. The service, which is offered alongside NTT Com’s server-monitoring/maintenance and antivirus services, ensures compliance with the customer's security policy through monitoring of networks and employee PCs and the generation of event logs. Automatic pop-up warnings to employees who breach the company's security policy, as well as other features, help to raise employee awareness of security policies and prevent accidental leaks of information. Customers do not need to maintain their own servers to use the service, and system updates are provided free of charge on the customer’s premises by an NTT Com engineer, who also goes on-site in the event of system failures or related emergencies. The service is compatible with operating systems in Japanese, English, Chinese and Korean. NTT Com aims to expand the service to more countries in Asia in the future.