The concept of cloud computing can be traced back to the 1960s, rooted in the notion of time-sharing. This year marks its twentieth anniversary, and the cloud continues to play an instrumental role within IT and OT organizations. Cloud services provide scalable, cost-effective on-demand compute, networking, and security infrastructure to power business operations. Its ability to be treated as an operational expense is invaluable, as well as its ability to provide new features and capabilities to meet ever-changing applications and workloads, including the rise of generative AI and agentic frameworks.
Over the past several weeks, I have had an opportunity to spend time with two NTT DATA executives and attend the company’s Horizons innovation summit in Dallas. One of my big takeaways from these conversations is what the Japanese tech giant is doing to reimagine cloud services in deep collaboration and co-innovation initiatives with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. NTT DATA is also investing in extensive co-development efforts beyond the cloud with connectivity solution providers, including Cisco, to rearchitect operating models to overcome the shortcomings of legacy infrastructure stacks in the AI era.
Amazon Web Services
NTT DATA is investing heavily in its partnership with AWS to empower its customers to adopt modern AI. A multi-year agreement between the companies aims to help enterprises modernize legacy systems, deploy agentic frameworks, and ensure proper agent observability and security. Critical focus areas include AI-enabled cloud transformation to unlock automation, sovereign-by-design solutions to protect sensitive data, and a recent announcement to transform contact centers through Amazon Connect.
NTT DATA is also doubling down on AI enablement through a dedicated AWS Business Group boasting over 10,000 experts, with plans to double its resources over the next few years. NTT DATA’s recent acquisition of Zero&One in February is also promising in the Middle East and North Africa. That region represents a significant growth market, and the addressable market for cloud services is expected to double to nearly $10 billion within the next several years.
Google Cloud
NTT DATA is also wisely investing significant resources in growing its relationship with Google Cloud. Google was one of the first hyperscalers to recognize the need to support sovereign workloads over a decade ago, before general market availability in the early 2020s. Today, sovereignty has become an important focus from a regional regulation and data privacy perspective with the rise of cloud-hosted AI models, applications, and workloads. The Gemini AI stack is also gaining wide traction, as evidenced by Apple’s decision to partner with Google to provide backend support to address the shortcomings of Apple Intelligence.
At a high level, NTT DATA and Google are collaborating across several fronts. One effort is tied to the Google Distributed Cloud to scale sovereignty into highly regulated markets, including Europe, India, Singapore, Australia, and the Middle East. Furthermore, NTT DATA is leveraging its knowledge base as a global service integrator to bring data depth to Gemini models and is exploring innovative techniques to enhance underlying infrastructure through AI compute and TPU co-development efforts with Google. NTT DATA is also making a commensurate investment in its dedicated Google Cloud Business Group to match what it is doing with AWS to meet enterprises where they are at with multi-cloud deployments.
Microsoft Azure
NTT DATA’s first major cloud services partnership was with Azure, since there was strong organic internal alignment driven by NTT’s customer set. The partnership has matured significantly over the past few years, serving as the blueprint for NTT DATA’s cloud service innovation journey. NTT DATA claims to be the first GSI to prototype multi-agent workflows using the Azure AI Foundry Agent Service, and it is a significant accomplishment to simplify deployment and ongoing operations. NTT DATA’s dedicated Microsoft Cloud Business Group is also the most mature of the three partnerships, offering 24,000 specialists across 50 countries focused on accelerating AI deployments to transform business operations and deliver significant productivity gains.
Agentic frameworks represent a black box to most enterprises, and just getting started is the biggest challenge. At the NTT DATA Horizons innovation summit in early February, I left impressed by what the business unit is doing to demystify agentic AI and enable the deployment and scale of agentic business services through pre-built solutions for insurance, banking, and broader manufacturing clients, with NVIDIA, Microsoft, and others. Following the event, I had an opportunity to spend more time with Charlie Li, NTT DATA’s president and global head of cloud & security. He emphasized that the focus is broader than just delivering cloud services; it is about helping clients overcome barriers to AI adoption and realize business value at scale. That is a bold vision, and by all measures, NTT DATA is delivering on that promise.
Connectivity Infrastructure Matters
I was first introduced to NTT and its various operating businesses about four years ago through my long-standing relationship with Cisco. What impressed me at that time was how NTT DATA was not simply a Cisco delivery channel; it was a solution development partner. Both companies have enjoyed a three-decade partnership, marked by the integration of world-class networking infrastructure with consulting, managed services, and lifecycle support. It is a formidable go-to-market alliance, one that is making an impact through NTT’s AI-powered Software Defined Infrastructure services designed specifically for Cisco products and other co-engineered solutions, including SASE, full-stack observability, and private 5G enterprise services, all of which play to both companies’ strengths.
Providing enterprises with the secure connectivity required to power today’s modern AI applications is critical. Large language models hosted in the cloud, and the emergence of small language models on devices and infrastructure at network edges, require data for both training and inference. In my most recent conversation with Dilip Kumar, NTT DATA’s president and global head of technology solutions, he succinctly summed up this need. Models are not the AI bottleneck; it is legacy infrastructure and traditional operating models. NTT DATA and Cisco are clearly focused on solving these challenges and, in the process, helping organizations rearchitect networking to understand what is needed to leverage the power of AI.
Final Thoughts
NTT DATA is quickly transforming the role of the GSI, evolving its services from merely integration to value-added digital transformation that has the potential to simplify AI adoption and deliver improved business outcomes. It is important to note that the playbooks differ, catering to the strengths and technological depth of each cloud service and networking infrastructure provider partnership. Multi-cloud deployments dominate the enterprise due to best-of-breed features and operational cost leverage, and NTT DATA has been wise to invest significantly across AWS, Google, Microsoft, and Cisco.
By all measures, it is a successful strategy, supported by NTT DATA’s significant wins, including a 10-year deal with UPS to modernize its infrastructure and a statewide agreement with the Texas Department of Information Resources to help it manage its multi-cloud estate. Modern AI applications and agentic frameworks are poised to radically transform enterprises of all sizes, and NTT DATA is well-positioned to capitalize on this, given its scale and deep co-development with the tech industry across clouds and connectivity infrastructure.
