NTT forms alliance with Microsoft to enable new digital solutions that help enterprise customers accelerate their digital transformations

NTT and Microsoft announced on Tuesday a multi-year strategic alliance aimed at delivering secure and reliable solutions that help enterprise customers accelerate their digital transformations. The alliance will bring together NTT’s ICT infrastructure, managed services and cybersecurity expertise, with Microsoft’s trusted cloud platform and AI technologies. 

Key initiatives of the alliance include the creation of a Global Digital Fabric, development of digital enterprise solutions built on Microsoft Azure, and co-innovation of next-generation technologies in the area of all-photonics network and digital twin computing.

As one of the world’s largest global technology and business solution organizations, NTT provides integrated services that include digital business consulting and managed services for cybersecurity, applications, cloud, data centers and global networks in over 190 countries and regions. 

As part of the alliance, NTT has chosen Microsoft Azure as its preferred cloud platform for modernizing its global IT infrastructure and customer solutions in the areas of advanced analytics for cybersecurity threat intelligence and the hybrid-IT management platform.

The alliance has announced formation of a Global Digital Fabric that weaves Microsoft Cloud and NTT’s globally connected ICT infrastructure, by combining the strengths of the two companies in the areas of productivity solutions, public cloud, global datacenter and network infrastructure. The Global Digital Fabric aims to create a highly sustainable, secure and robust environment for enterprises to accelerate their digital ambitions around the world.

The alliance also covers the development of digital solutions built on Microsoft Azure to empower enterprises to accelerate their digital transformation and to operate more securely from the enterprise to the edge to the cloud. Key initiatives include advanced analytics for cybersecurity threat intelligence, social robotics with relational AI for digital companions, digital workplace solutions, as well as knowledge discovery and management.

The alliance will also explore research and development of all-photonics network and digital twin computing as part of NTT’s Innovative Optical and Wireless Network (IOWN) concept. The goal is to provide a more natural interaction between people, nature and technology, and to support sustainable growth with an optical-based networking and information processing platform of the future.

Furthermore, NTT and Microsoft are committed to harnessing the power of technology for a more sustainable future. The companies intend to work together to invest in innovative projects that leverage technology to build on NTT’s sustainability initiatives and Microsoft’s AI for Earth grants.

“NTT is committed to helping enterprises realize their digital transformation initiatives to help create a smarter world. We believe that the combination of the Microsoft Azure platform along with NTT’s connected infrastructure and service delivery capabilities will accelerate these efforts,” said Jun Sawada, president and CEO of NTT. “Additionally, the companies will collaborate on IOWN, including areas such as all-photonics network and digital twin computing.”

“Our strategic alliance combines NTT’s global infrastructure and services expertise with the power of Azure,” said Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft. “Together, we will build new solutions spanning AI, cybersecurity and hybrid cloud, as we work to help enterprise customers everywhere accelerate their digital transformation.”

Veritas tested and validated for AWS Outposts; will help customers overcome challenges of on-premises and cloud environments

Veritas Technologies announced this week that it has the capabilities to support AWS Outposts, and has tested it and found that it can help to deliver positive customer outcomes at scale through re-architecting complex workloads to run on AWS.

AWS Outposts are fully managed and configurable compute and storage racks built with Amazon Web Services (AWS)-designed hardware that allow customers to run compute and storage on-premises, while seamlessly connecting to AWS’s broad array of services in the cloud. 

AWS and Veritas customers may have certain workloads that need to remain on-premises for several years, such as applications that are latency sensitive and need to be near on-premises assets. These customers want to be able to run AWS compute and storage on-premises, while easily and seamlessly integrating these workloads with the rest of their applications on AWS. 

Until now, customers lacked the same APIs, tools, hardware, and functionality across on-premises and cloud to deliver a truly consistent hybrid experience. 

AWS Outposts solves these challenges by delivering racks of AWS compute and storage—the same hardware used in AWS public region datacenters—to customers, bringing AWS services, infrastructure, and operating models on-premises. With AWS Outposts, Veritas can help AWS customers overcome the challenges that exist with managing and supporting infrastructures in both on-premises and cloud environments and deliver positive outcomes at scale.

Veritas worked closely with the AWS Outposts team to be one of the first AWS Partner Network (APN) members to successfully test and validate its solution with AWS Outposts. This included the deployment of a NetBackup Amazon Machine Image (AMI) to AWS Outposts and the backup and recovery of workloads for mission critical applications between AWS Outposts and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). 

Validating Veritas NetBackup on AWS Outposts provides the enterprise scale data protection that Veritas is known for to newly extended on-premises environments.

HPE, Cray release comprehensive HPC and AI offerings optimized for exascale computing on premises, in the cloud, or as-a-service

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced Thursday that it will deliver comprehensive high-performance computing (HPC) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) portfolio for the exascale era, which is characterized by explosive data growth and new converged workloads such as HPC, AI, and analytics.

The addition of Cray Inc., which HPE recently acquired, bolsters HPE’s HPC and AI solutions to now encompass an end-to-end supercomputing architecture across compute, interconnect, software, storage and services, delivered on premises, hybrid or as-a-Service. Now every enterprise can leverage the same foundational HPC technologies that power the world’s fastest systems, and integrate them into their data centers to unlock insights and fuel new discovery.

Digital transformation is driving new data-intensive workloads and real-time analytics operating at an unprecedented scale. New software, compute, interconnect, and storage capabilities are required for customers to unlock the potential of their data and accelerate innovation. 

HPE delivers solutions for any experience from single, small systems all the way to exascale-class supercomputers with tailored software, interconnect and storage capabilities. This includes solutions for modeling and simulation in weather forecasting, manufacturing and energy sectors, and AI and big data analytics in precision medicine, autonomous vehicles, geospatial imaging and financial services.