Kiran Bhagwanani, CEO – South Asia, Japan, New Zealand, Dimension Data Asia Pacific Pte Ltd, shares his roadmap for the year ahead.
Integration of Dimension Data, NTT Comms, NTT Security and NTT i3 was announced late last year, how have things changed for you in the way you do business since then?
NTT Inc, a new global holding company under NTT Corporation, was created in October 2018 with an aim to create new value by bringing together the synergies of group companies and expanding our global footprint. A new global operating company to be set up from July 1, 2019 under NTT Inc will together leverage the expertise of NTT Communications, Dimension Data, NTT Security and NTTi3, offering full stack solutions spanning across cyber security, data centres, managed ICT services, cloud, AI and analytics and system integration under one roof, while working closely with NTT Data for application and software services.
For our clients, this means a fuller and wider portfolio in existing and emerging technologies managed by a single entity under a single services agreement. This also gives us an opportunity to bring together our considerable talent pool under one umbrella for fully integrated solutions and driving efficiencies.
How do you see Dimension Data synergising with other NTT group companies moving forward and how do you see this impacting the offerings that Dimension Data has been providing to its customers all along?
This is an exciting period for us as a company and with the integration we are headed towards achieving our One NTT vision. Even for the past few years, we have had a collaborative go-to-market model between various NTT group companies and with the integration it will make it far easier to take the combined portfolio to our clients under a single unified brand.
This integration will enable our clients and partners to accelerate their ambitions through digital transformation by offering a seamless, combined set of expertise, as well as leverage the significant investments we are making in innovation.
How do you see digital transformation shaping up across enterprises over the next year or so? What, in your view, are the key aspects that enterprises should focus on to ensure a successful digital transformation journey?
Digital transformation in enterprises over the coming years would revolve around developing digital ready infrastructure, that focuses on IT optimisation, infrastructure consolidation, application modernisation and automated operations.
According to a Gartner forecast, the spending on ICT in India is expected to grow 6.7 per cent to $89.2 billion in 2019. This growth is backed by the digital transformation initiatives adopted by the private and government entities to update their business processes, including bringing in new products and developing new capabilities.
Areas like Software as a Service market (SaaS), data and analytics, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT) are leading the IT services segment. The emergence of new channels of client engagement, shifting revenue streams and rapidly evolving consumption models calls for rapid transformation.
We will see businesses architecting their data management capability to capture, store, move and secure business data. It’s imperative that the data architectures they create afford them speedy access to data from their infrastructure.
Another defining component of today’s infrastructures are applications. The latest generation of applications dictate where they run and how they operate. So tighter integration between application outcomes and infrastructure management is becoming critical. The conversation has shifted to how an application can exploit the infrastructure to deliver a faster outcome.
Enterprise digital transformation is fundamentally about an organisation’s appetite to harness data and make more informed decisions. From a technology standpoint it is typically a journey from a current state of readiness to a desired state. It means transforming the way you run your applications, your infrastructure and your IT operations.
Our approach is delivering digital infrastructure across all towers, off the cloud and potentially across a multi-cloud environment, making sure it is secure and managed, thereby delivering a true hybrid IT capability in different commercial consumption models.
Information security is a critical cause for concern in a digitally transformed era. Considering this a major area of focus for Dimension Data, how are you going about helping your customers address the security part?
While digital transformation is driving experience and outcomes, it means more open systems in a hyper-connected era. And the paradox is that on one hand the world is moving towards more protectionism (or closed borders), the digital wave is driving the exact opposite, which is digital value creation leads to more networked systems and more networked individuals. And as we do that, we are opening up multiple attack surfaces. The key however is not in isolation of critical data but managing security despite the criticality of business data. And that can be addressed by having a cyber security architecture that provides more contextual security, proactive intelligence and instant response.
Dimension Data’s cyber security practice is working with NTT Security to offer full suite cyber security to our clients leveraging on NTT Security’s Global Threat Intelligence Platform (with real time feeds) and managed security services in tow.
With the increased adoption of cloud, IT consumption models of enterprises are changing. How will this trend impact your business model?
The change in consumption model is driving the adoption of cloud business in India. It isn’t just private or public cloud adoption today, it is more about multi-cloud adoption. The multi-cloud architecture enables enterprises and organisations to distribute their workload as per their requirement, across multiple cloud environments, while also mitigating risk. Considering the dynamic cyber landscape, organisations can segregate their workloads depending on its sensitivity in private and cost-effective public cloud network.
Dimension Data is at the forefront of identifying and providing clients with solutions that would best work for their workloads. Our cloud services meet today’s business and IT challenges, speed up development and transformation and lower costs. They also mitigate business risks by providing secure, responsive, high-availability infrastructure that can respond to unexpected demand or market downturns. We believe that the current scenario presents a huge opportunity to accelerate digital transformation.
We also recognise that not all workloads, and therefore not all IT services, will necessarily be deployed on a public cloud or usage-based consumption model. And that has prompted us to offer hybrid cloud capabilities in a mix of consumption model—capex, opex, as-a-service, or a combination thereof.
