ICT solutions firm NTT Communications hopes to strengthen its European unified communications (UC) offerings on the back of two new announcements.
Japanese business NTT revealed a new unified-communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) in Frankfurt would support its UC efforts in Europe at Cloud Expo last week, and today opened a presence in Interxion’s London City data centre.
Len Padilla, VP of product strategy, told CBR the idea was to reduce latency to EMEA customers by cutting out its Japan base, as well as unifying their global comms infrastructure, rather than a focus on ensuring their data was not passing through passages where the NSA could intercept it.
He said: "The geography is less important everyday; trust the math. The math of cryptography is the only way to keep it safe."
He also confirmed NTT would focus on tying together its own Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) with its own Arcstar UC services as well as those of Arkadin, the French UC specialist it bought last November for an undisclosed sum.
"We’re focused on wrapping services around the infrastructure service," Padilla said. "One of the things we’re adding to it locally with the Arkadin acquisition is the whole online collaboration suite.
"It’s everything from the telephony part, presence, and obviously that matches really well with the messaging services we already offer."
NTT’s presence in Interxion’s central London location means it is also much closer to a large number of financial service firms.
"NTT is ideally positioned as a primary choice, providing a gateway to Asia for European companies’ communication needs," said Clive Hamilton, VP of network services for Europe.
The news could also see existing financial services customers located within Interxion gaining direct access to services such as NTT Global Ethernet service, which provides fixed low latency capacity from Europe to Asia, with speeds from 50Mb to over 1Gbps.
