Dimension Data South Africa MD, Nompumelelo Mokou, shared her vision for network as a service powered by the NTT SPEKTRA platform, which launched in March 2023. “The NTT Global Network report has found that 97% of CIOs and CTOs agree that networks are vital for enabling outcomes related to business growth. However, enterprises in South Africa are refocusing their budget and skills towards cloud and application adoption and cyber, especially as business priorities for client and employee experience are maturing.
“NTT and Dimension Data are now able to offer clients flexible commercial investment options to modernise their networks, to ensure that CIOs deliver mature, proactively managed connectivity to the business, at their WAN, LAN or edge,” continues Mokou. “Whether clients require maturity assessments, software-defined technology only, managed networking or network as a service, we are gearing the South African team of NTT/Dimension Data to support any client requirement.”
The SPEKTRA-powered managed networking or network as a service combines global engineering skills and AI/ML-based tooling with regional architecture and service operations to enable proactive incident management and resolution. “We can offer clients SLA or XLA-driven outcomes, either on a subscription or consumption model. The advantage of being a globally owned business means that the annual $3.6 billion NTT R&D investment, including transformative technologies such as AI and ML, can be leveraged for South African clients in networking, collaboration and productivity, application or cloud,” suggests Mokou.
Prashil Gareeb, Vice-President of NTT Dimension Data Managed Networking and Collaboration Services, adds that the challenges faced by clients in managing their networks, such as evolving business priorities due to economic pressure, depth in skills, diversity in network vendors across LAN or WAN, decisions in multicloud and hybrid work plans and the resilience of deployments as clients face challenges in power and new sustainability goals, can make network design choices and operating frameworks extremely challenging for CIOs.
“Enterprises require service providers that hold certification in multiple network vendors with skills in application and cloud delivery, security and AIOps-driven management and observability. The richness in NTT technologies such as SPEKTRA with skills across the globe is very appealing to clients ready to outsource their network while developing investments in client or employee experience technologies, applications, cloud and operational technologies,” says Gareeb.
“Enterprises in South Africa are invited to engage NTT/Dimension Data to understand the SPEKTRA platform in their current environments and to develop a roadmap for network modernisation with proactive management, or network as a service,” concludes Gareeb.
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