NTT Communications Beefs Up Enterprise Cloud

In order to make its public cloud offering perform in a more open and automated manner, NTT Communications announced today that it's using OpenStack's APIs in its Enterprise Cloud.

The OpenStack APIs give NTT Communications Corp. (NYSE: NTT) customers the ability to automate control of their workloads in Enterprise Cloud.

Also on the open source front, NTT Communications is using Cloud Foundry's software as the foundation for its platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering. By partnering with OpenStack and Cloud Foundry, NTT Communications, which is the IT and networking division of NTT, has added devops and agility to its Enterprise Cloud platform.

NTT Communications says it has revamped Enterprise Cloud to help enterprises meet the requirements of their digital transformations. The newest version of Enterprise Cloud is available in Japan, with launches in the United Kingdom, Singapore, United States, Australia, Hong Kong and Germany slated for this year.

For hosted private cloud deployments, Enterprise Cloud can now work with bare-metal servers that feature multi-hypervisor environments, including VMware Inc. (NYSE: VMW) vSphere and Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) Hyper-V.

NTT says that the Enterprise Cloud platform is connected via a free 10Gbps closed network. The operator also provides connectivity between Enterprise Cloud platforms and data centers through NTT's global carrier infrastructure, either at a low cost or for free.

By providing a closer connection between public and private clouds on its internal network, NTT says it can cut costs while improving the performance and reach of enterprises' global businesses.

NTT Communications also announced it has launched its own cloud management platform (CPM) to unify control of both Enterprise Cloud and third-party cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.

While there has been a trend of late for cloud services to move from private to public clouds, the general consensus seems to be that hybrid clouds are the wave of the future. By adding the new features to Enterprise Cloud, NTT is better equipped to compete against Google, AWS, Microsoft and other global cloud providers.

NTT has plans for even more features for Enterprise Cloud -- including SAP AG (NYSE/Frankfurt: SAP) HANA cloud integration, virtual private PaaS and enhanced cloud management capabilities -- but didn't say when those new features would be available.

— Mike Robuck, editor, Telco Transformation