NTT's Customer-Centric Approach Helps It Deliver Agile and Scalable Outcome-Based Solutions

No organization was truly ready for the widescale disruptions wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic, but some organizations were better prepared than others. The world’s best IT providers became trusted advisors who were not only able to save their customers from disaster, but also help them grow during one of the most challenging years on record.

In 2019, Dimension Data, NTT Communications and NTT Security were among the 31 IT companies and brands from more than 70 countries that merged into one $11 billion technology services company known simply as NTT Ltd. Headquartered in London, UK, NTT serves more than 10,000 clients worldwide, helping them achieve their digital transformation goals by using its full-stack technology and integrated services platform. Client benefits include enhanced customer and employee experiences, modernized infrastructure using a cloud strategy, stronger cybersecurity, global interconnected data centers and many others.

NTT Ltd. was formed in 2019 mere months before the COVID-19 pandemic sent office workers home everywhere. Yet, NTT worked with its customers, to overcome several unprecedented challenges. One such case was of a leading highly rated bank in Southeast Asia, that faced many challenges, including slow time-to-market for new services due to procurement lead times averaging more than three months. The bank was unable to meet its line of business requirements for agile, scalable cloud technologies to support collaboration, and it felt increasing pressure to innovate. To make matters worse, it was hindered with the challenges of meeting risk management regulations. What finally convinced the bank to seek help was its inability to provide secure, remote working for employees when the lockdowns hit.
 

Partner Lifecycle Services to Create Customer for Life Value

NTT stepped in to provide digital transformation consulting services across Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia over an 18-month period. It started with a series of advisory workshops to determine quantifiable success metrics and then deployed experienced consultants to perform technical evaluations and proof of concepts for specific use cases. For day-to-day operations, the bank chose to go with an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) platform powered and automated by VMware Cloud Foundation. It chose to maximize employee productivity with secure remote access to critical applications and data while maintaining compliance with VMware Horizon. Project managers made sure the rollout was executed properly and on track to deliver the target outcomes.

The result? Time-to-market for new services accelerated by up to 60 percent, including the onboarding of 30 innovative applications to support new customer experiences. The shift also enabled teams to focus more time on high-priority activities for new lines of business and services. In addition, 70 percent of the bank’s employees were given remote access in just three weeks. Despite the pandemic, the bank’s sales grew by roughly a third in fiscal year 2020, proving that an agile and resilient IT strategy can accelerate growth even during the toughest years.

NTT won the VMware Partner Lifecycle Services Award for Asia-Pacific-Japan in 2021 for its work on this and similar projects. Every year, for the VMware Partner Achievement Awards, VMware recognizes partners that demonstrate outstanding results and innovation using VMware products and solutions. The VMware Partner Lifecycle Services Award recognizes partners for moving customers to an ongoing partner-customer relationship from a project-based intermittent relationship.

Strengthening Customer Lifecycle Capabilities

As the business market inches back to normalcy, organizations are now at an accelerated pace to embrace digitalization for speed and scale, with a fundamental desire to shift to a truly digital workforce. This also means an increased number of customers would be grappling with the complexities of solutions and methodology in the current software-defined world.

With a customer-centric approach, the global system integrator starts with a consultative process to understand customer business needs and delivers outcome-based solutions that are agile and scalable. Through an assessment, this determines if the customer has the correct skills or expertise for the task or support required to manage day-to-day IT operations and the project, across multi-vendor hybrid IT, secured and end user computing environments. Where there is a skill gap, NTT’s managed services arm, can help to plug in. Consequently, this reduces time and complexity to deploy resulting in cost savings for customers.

At the center of businesses looking to transform their digital capabilities to fuel growth this year and beyond, be it cloud migration, or on any modernized platform for faster consumption of services, cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS), is the partner ecosystem. NTT understands the demand and the tremendous opportunities this presents and has been focused on up-skilling, building its deep technical and services capabilities to elevate its trusted advisor status with customers.

The shift to customer lifecycles has also driven NTT to move beyond transactional selling with its customer success management team charted to add value to its client base progressing from adopt, expand to renew.

From offering new solutions to adopting differentiated go-to-market strategies within the context of SaaS in this new normal, the ability to provide end-to-end solutions is critical to align with customer buying patterns. A believer of the importance of the ecosystem as a VMware partner, NTT collaborates with partners who complement its internal skills to abstract complexity in rolling out their extensive service offerings to the market.