NTT Research held its signature Upgrade event in the heart of Silicon Valley this week. I had an opportunity for a third year in a row to join customers, partners, and company executives over two days for a visionary keynote, compelling panel sessions, and impactful technical demonstrations.
With a continued theme of summarizing my event attendance with three big takeaways – let’s dive in!
Incubation Designed To Scale Innovation
Upgrade kicked off with its keynote emphasizing NTT Research’s efforts that serve as a foundation for meaningful innovation. It is a message that I have heard at past Upgrade events, but this year the Japanese tech giant put wood behind the arrow. To address what I perceive as a lingering challenge for the company, the research arm is embarking on an incubation strategy.
Dubbed Scale Academy, the initiative is designed to harness the last seven years of NTT Research’s findings to move its exhaustive efforts into productization. In my conversations with leadership, this was attempted in the past but never fully materialized. This issue may stem from NTT DATA’s emphasis on core revenue streams such as data center deployments, private 5G, and GSI services. However, that has changed with Scale Academy through a defined mission statement of discovery, incubation, commercialization, and scale. What is also new is the willingness to explore new distribution channels, partnerships, ecosystems, and co-investment opportunities by outside investors. The latter is a massive mindset change for NTT, given its historic protective stance on its internal research and development efforts.
SaltGrain Aims To Secure Agentic AI
The announcement of SaltGrain is the first Scale Academy candidate, and NTT Research positions it to be the industry’s first zero trust data security platform leveraging attribute-based encryption. The naming is clever. Salt is a term used to describe a random value added to data, a password added before processing by a hashing function. Grain represents the notion of a fine grained approach to encryption.
ABE is not a new concept. It was first introduced two decades ago and matured within mobile ad hoc networks through the need to share data securely across IoT and edge environments involving dynamic identities that harkens to AI agents. ABE’s superpower is that it ties defined attributes and policies to underlying data as a wrapper. NTT Research realized its potential, and over the past several years, it enhanced ABE through the development of unique algorithmic intellectual property. What I like about ABE is that it is complimentary to existing cybersecurity platforms, offering another layer of protection while mitigating tool sprawl.
NTT Research’s hypothesis is that current zero trust frameworks fall short with a conventional focus on perimeter systems and networks. Furthermore, the team led by Kazu Gomi, argues that zero trust breaks when breached, and renders infrastructure vulnerable to the weaponization of AI by bad actors. I wholeheartedly agree, and the opportunity for SaltGrain to address concerns related to securing data at rest and in motion while also offering post-quantum cryptography resilience is immense – especially as it relates to the explosive use of data for modern AI training and inferencing.
The Disruptive Potential Of Programmable Photonics
Another NTT Research investigation that warrants attention is tied to programmable non-linear photonics silicon. The notion of enabling the ability to change the characteristics of data transmission, including waveforms that control capacity, throughput, and latency over light is powerful. It can provide investment protection, eliminate capital and operational expenses tied to future optical network upgrades that involve truck rolls, and lower power consumption to deliver more sustainable AI workload and application support. Management caveats that this investigation is still in its preliminary stages, and it is likely another five year research endeavor before it becomes another Scale Academy candidate. However, on the surface, it is as promising as SaltGrain.
Final Thoughts
As I wandered the event, there were posters hung on easels throughout the venue heralding the phrase “the (research) paper is the invention,” but inventions in the absence of a clear go to market strategy to deliver scale and foster adoption keeps research investigations stuck in proof of concepts. The good news is that NTT Research has architected a new path, and most importantly, it is supported by its headquarters in Tokyo. This is promising, and finally galvanizes a new path to moving NTT’s research to reality.
