In the first episode of ITWeb TV Biz, Tylor Affolter, senior vice-president of managed services at NTT DATA, and Prashil Gareeb, vice-president MNCS at NTT DATA, Middle East and Africa, provide the inside track on Dimension Data’s rebrand to NTT DATA, and the company’s latest service offerings and objectives.
NTT DATA is a global organisation with $30 billion in annual revenue and is the world’s fifth-largest global IT services provider, providing a full stack of services to customers.
This is according to Affolter, who spoke to ITWeb TV, stating: “We are the world’s third-largest data centre provider, with the fourth-largest internet backbone, so we can layer next-generation IT services and capabilities that include anything from application development, through to business consulting and vertical industry solutions.”
When asked why Dimension Data has taken the step to rebrand after 14 years, Gareeb explains that the company has embraced the change for three key reasons.
“There’s a lot of research and development (R&D) investment coming out of NTT DATA, with the goal of helping our clients through vertical solutioning and providing them with transformative technologies,” he says.
“Secondly, we’ve moved our business closer to where we want to go, making purposeful efforts to prepare ourselves for this change. Our practices are now aligned to more global services.”
He adds that the third driving force behind the move is to provide customers with a singular entity that allows for local and global teams to deliver augmented services and capabilities. This move aligns with recent shifts in the structure of the NTT brand outside of Japan as NTT Ltd and NTT DATA have integrated. It was, says Affolter, a great opportunity for Dimension Data to take the step and move further within NTT.
“Now, the company can take advantage of the additional capabilities on offer from the NTT DATA business,” he says. “It’s a differentiated full-stack portfolio that’s not just cloud or consulting or advisory; it’s all these capabilities brought together to drive the most value for clients.”
Access to local and global capabilities
The company’s portfolio is structured in such a way as to deliver end-to-end experiences to customers, and the South African arm brings something relevant to the table.
“We deliver a lot of the services for the global business out of South Africa,” says Gareeb. “The collaboration productivity business is supported from Port Elizabeth, our apps and cloud business is driven from Johannesburg, and the AI that drives the Tour de France was developed in South Africa. We have skills that are benchmarked on a global basis.”
NTT DATA has more than 140 000 employees, globally, and is rated as a top employer in 54 countries, including South Africa. The organisation has the kind of talent, infrastructure and resources that combine to deliver layered service offerings to customers.
“We focus on business outcomes for our clients; that’s really where we start,” says Affolter. “From there, we focus on ensuring excellence in what we deliver, whether it’s AI or next-generation cloud or connectivity.”
NTT DATA Middle East and Africa brings a strong skills portfolio and capabilities to the NTT DATA organisation. Able to develop, deploy and deliver solutions, the company also ensures customers get the experience they need to drive business outcomes. It is, as Affolter highlights, a strategy that’s working.
“We’ve seen double the number of clients, grown devices on our platforms by six times over the past 12 months, and we have seen a five times reduction in tickets when we move clients to our platform. We’re also seeing a 30% reduction in resolution times and can predict outages up to nine hours in advance because of our capabilities,” he notes.
Share