NTT Communications is partnering with Mirantis to extend its Enterprise Cloud into private OpenStack-as-a-service, the two companies announced Thursday.

NTT Communications Corp. (NYSE: NTT) is adding Private OpenStack on bare metal servers to its portfolio of Enterprise Cloud services, available in 11 countries including the US, and across Asia, Australia and Europe. Existing services include bare metal servers, called NTT Enterprise Cloud Metal-as-a-Service, as well as multi-tenant OpenStack cloud services. (See NTT Not Shying Away From Data Center Play.)

Private OpenStack is designed to give customers the benefit of private cloud -- control over their own applications and data, particularly customer data and other sensitive data requiring maximum security -- combined with the flexibility of running IT off-premises, letting NTT and Mirantis Inc. handle operations and management.

"Some people can't have public cloud but they want the same hands-off experience with infrastructure being invisible. This is what we're looking at with NTT," Boris Renski, Mirantis CMO and co-founder, tells Light Reading.

The private cloud service is part of NTT's strategy to move large enterprise customers beyond traditional applications -- such as CRM and ERP -- to a new generation of "cloud-native IT" applications including IoT, analytics, big data and mobile, says Hideki Kikujo, NTT's senior manager for global product management.

NTT tapped Mirantis because of the vendor's focus on management and operations, in addition to technology, Kikujo says. NTT shares that focus.

NTT is providing data center space, hardware service level agreements, and connectivity -- "everything that has to do with tin, effectively," Renski says. Mirantis is providing OpenStack software and support, with joint service level agreements between the two companies to give customers "one throat to choke."

In competing in the cloud, NTT is going up against upstart cloud providers with huge market share, particularly Amazon Web Services Inc. , the market leader by far, and Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) Azure, as well as IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) and Google (Nasdaq: GOOG). NTT's advantage is it combines data centers with global SDN-based wide-area networking, to create a closed network, Kikujo says.

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Additionally, NTT is no small player itself. Parent NTT Group (NYSE: NTT) has more data center floor space than anyone in the world, with the second-largest IP network of any Tier 1 Global provider, network coverage in 196 countries and regions, $95 billion total revenue and 241,000 employees worldwide, the company says.

Also, AWS and the big cloud providers aren't always competitors -- sometimes they partner with NTT. "Yes, we go against them but in some deals we go with them," he says.

For Mirantis, NTT is the company's first data center services partner. It's part of the company's overall strategy to become a full-service cloud provider without running its own data centers. "It means we are more and more competitive to a managed service provider, like Rackspace," Renski says. The company expects to partner with other data center operators in the future. (See Mirantis Charts Course Far Beyond OpenStack.)

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— Mitch Wagner, , Editor, Light Reading Enterprise Cloud