NTT and Cisco have worked closely together for more than 30 years. By combining Cisco’s products with our portfolio of services, we’ve helped clients across the globe to realize their business goals. In 2022, we were named Cisco’s Global Managed Services Partner of the Year in recognition of our business success, innovation, and sales and service delivery. 

Our partnership is stronger than ever, and we have a renewed focus on strategic areas such as infrastructure modernization, the introduction of subscription software and Enterprise Agreements, lifecycle support services and managed services.

That’s why we attended Cisco Live 2023 in Amsterdam – the latest in a series of Cisco conferences for clients, partners, technology experts and business leaders.

Cisco Live ran from 7 to 9 February and included keynote addresses, innovation talks, and interviews with clients and partners like NTT as well as Cisco’s engineers and executives. We facilitated a series of round-table sessions where we discussed our 360 Observability offering, which enables our clients to monitor their full IT stack while identifying and attending to performance issues before they can affect their operations.

Helping our clients to maximize value

As Cisco transform their technology to deliver the benefits of software-driven infrastructure, we have focused on evolving our support services to streamline and simplify our clients’ IT operations by tapping the potential of analytics and automation.

Organizations that lack a comprehensive lifecycle management strategy for their infrastructure investments will find it harder to ensure consistent governance, risk mitigation and cost control. That’s where NTT comes in, providing the expertise and tools they need from procurement to activation, support and license management.

In close collaboration with Cisco, we have evolved our tried-and-trusted Uptime services to give clients such as multinational brewer HEINEKEN and insurance company WWK Versicherungen the visibility and control they need to maximize the lifecycle value of both their multivendor software-defined assets and their legacy hardware.   

The evolution of software-defined infrastructure

Our Software-defined Infrastructure Services maximize technology innovation. With capabilities such as controllers, customer experience cloud, AI and machine learning, we enable organizations to mitigate operational risk and deliver maximum return on investment.

Our digital services platform uses deep API-level integration and high levels of automation to support digital operations and enable the high-quality user experiences that our clients can rely on to support their changing business demands.

But our approach to the changing needs of IT operations goes further than simply keeping up with the shift to software-based infrastructure.

We follow a complete lifecycle approach for license management, based on best practices that range from cost-efficient procurement to insights and recommendations. This ensures compliance, efficient utilization and ongoing mitigation of operational and financial risk.

Our trusted Uptime support services ensure asset availability, which is still important. But now, by automatically discovering the assets in a multivendor infrastructure and using our collaborative SDI Services, we can also provide predictive insights and recommendations to reduce the risk of downtime while delivering the visibility and control needed for effective governance and lifecycle cost management.

Dilip Kumar is Chief Digital and Global Business Solutions Officer at NTT