Podcast: NTT Americas CEO Simon Walsh on providing services in a hybrid world

As he settles into his new job, Simon Walsh, the new CEO of NTT Ltd.'s Americas business, joined the podcast to talk about his new role and what NTT is focused on outside of its Asia footprint and where it aims to make a difference for businesses adjusting to life in a pandemic.

Since early March, when offices were closed due to the pandemic, the first problem companies had to solve was getting access to their data in a distributed workplace, Walsh explained. "What you're now seeing is businesses saying, 'We can work from home, but how do we get hyper productive from home? How do we get our datasets to be distributed? How do we move to much more of a collaborative working environment, where the meeting room is now entirely virtual, and the whiteboard is spread across, you know, ten employees, screens, etc.?'"

Walsh adds: "We're seeing a shift from that sudden wave of, 'Can I get access?' to 'How do I productively collaborate with distributed colleagues and be as efficient as I was – or as enabled with data – as I was when I was sitting in a shared office.'"

The CEO said that outside of Asia, NTT's value will be primarily in helping enterprise customers "take the pain away" from having "multiple network providers, multiple cloud providers and multiple applications." In addition to making that hybrid-everything world easier to manage, NTT wants to layer security services on top as well.

"Our opportunity is in providing that service experience across the hybrid cloud, sitting on top of a heterogeneous network experience, which would incorporate physical wired, wireless and, increasingly, mobile, 5G-type services," Walsh said.