*UKHotViewsExtra* NTT DATA – differentiating through R&D

NTT DATA is not your typical ‘run of the mill’ Systems Integrator (SI), possessing access through the wider NTT Group (Japan’s biggest Telco the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation) to an enormous Research and Development (R&D) machine being channelled to help address some of the biggest issues posed by the rise of ‘Society 5.0’ (the Japanese government’s take on the ‘Super Smart Society’ and a shift toward a human-centered, knowledge-based, and data-driven society).

In a Software and IT Services (SITS) market where many SIs sound ‘me too’ with similar ecosystems and value propositions, NTT DATA stands out as clearly different. I spent some time earlier last week listening to members of NTT DATA’s UK&I team run through some of the key research areas and how they are being used to solve real world problems.

First off, Tom Winstanley NTT DATA’s UK&I CTO took us through a whirlwind tour of some of the key research themes being worked on within the wider NTT Group – which broadly fall into three main areas. Which are ‘next generation of the internet’, ‘Space and energy research’ and of course AI where NTT has been a leader in Japan for some time on Natural Language Processing (NLP) but has now naturally progressed into GenAI, with the roll out its own LLM called tsuzumi.

Winstanley went on to run through some of the fundamental research that NTT showcased at its recent R&D summit in Tokyo. The summit is a big event in Japan welcoming some 20,000 visitors over 4 days, with some 100+  exhibitions by scientists and researchers sharing their solutions addressing some of the key global challenges, ranging from rapid data growth through to demands on power consumption. For an example closer to home, NTT DATA is the 3rd largest data centre provider globally and its ‘Innovative Optical and Wireless Network’ (IOWN)technology has already been tested in the UK. NTT DATA connected its data centres in Hemel Hempstead and Dagenham, East London using the latest optical technologies, which NTT refer to as the “All Photonic Network” (APN), and communication between them operated with a round-trip delay of less than 1 millisecond - typical delays between data centres at an equivalent distances can exceed 2 milliseconds. The aim being to join up geographically distributed IT infrastructure into a functioning equivalent of a single data centre, regardless of where they are physically located. Other use cases for this type of low latency high bandwidth include high latency video transmission between countries, remote healthcare and remote manufacturing inspections.

TechMarketView subscribers can read more on our analysis of NTT DATA’s R&D in UKHotViewsExtra (download here). If you are not yet a subscriber or are unsure if your organisation has a corporate subscription, please contact Belinda Tewson to find out more.

Posted by Marc Hardwick at '11:11' - Tagged: innovation   R&D   Japan