NTT Introduces CloudWAN to Deliver Cloud-Ready Enterprise Networks Starting from South Africa and Japan

PALO ALTO, CA and JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA and TOKYO, JAPAN--(Marketwired - May 30, 2017) - NTT Innovation Institute Inc. (NTT i³), a prominent Silicon Valley innovation center for NTT Group, and Internet Solutions (IS), the leading pan-African telecoms services provider, NTT PC Communications (NTTPC), a network service and communication solution provider in Japan, announced today global collaboration on the delivery of CloudWAN.

A collaborative, worldwide development effort across several members of the NTT Group, CloudWAN combines both software-defined Wide Area Network technology (SD-WAN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) into one environment, enabling enterprise customers to deliver advanced services to the computing edge.

CloudWAN delivers an enhanced user experience, powerful flexibility and agility to NTT's enterprise customers. With CloudWAN, enterprise customers can maintain and deliver high quality services, consistent policies and robust security.

"With CloudWAN, NTT Group delivers one-stop productive operation management for the entire ICT environment," said Hiromichi Shinohara, Senior Executive Vice President, CTO for NTT. "By combining NTT i³'s Silicon Valley-based R&D with the strengths and features of each NTT Group company, I believe we are a stronger company that significantly contributes to the business value of a wide variety of customers."

NTT is uniquely able to leverage the strengths and global presence of its operating companies to develop an open, agile product that weaves SD-WAN and NFV functionality into an intelligent service delivery fabric that drives rapid growth and expansion while minimizing network costs, reducing complexity and increasing control.

"CloudWAN empowers businesses with an accelerated path to leverage new software easily and in an agile way at the edge of their network," said Nina Simosko, President and CEO, NTT i³. "This opens the door to a whole new level of business flexibility and enables rapid business transformation, and that is the heart and soul of what we do here at NTT i³."

Today's enterprises must adapt to successfully achieve digital transformation, cloud-based consumption and infrastructure convergence. These paradigm shifts require a radically different approach to networking. CloudWAN offers enterprises a simple, three-step journey designed to modernize their network and transform their business.

1: Decouple Physical Assets and Develop a Virtualized Service Plane
As a first step, CloudWAN delivers a platform to link public and private clouds and on premise infrastructures into a single, seamless virtual network. This new virtualized service plane provides the capability to then extend network services across the enterprise in a controlled and consistent way.

2: Migrate Ecosystem to Virtualized Service Plane
With a virtualized service plane in place, enterprises can now deploy third party virtualized network functions (NFV) such as firewall and WAN acceleration onto the unified virtual network, eliminating the need to send highly skilled network administrators onsite to manage the rollout.

3: Focus Beyond Connectivity Services 
The third step is where enterprises truly transform their business with the ability to rapidly deliver applications and services to the edge. In this case, necessary applications and services can be instantly deployed to user communities at the edges of the network.

The result of this modernization is that enterprise customers can now proactively plan for network needs, while also managing their existing infrastructure investments. Similarly, enterprise cloud operators running a wide range of traditional enterprise applications from multiple vendors or cloud-native workloads can flexibly consolidate their application silos into one universal data infrastructure. 

CloudWAN: Features and Benefits
FEATURES

• Unified Virtual Network for linking public and private clouds, and on-premises infrastructure
• Management support of infrastructure, network functions, and applications from a single cloud-based console
• Extensible Network Functions provided by software that interoperates with the core virtual network
• Integration of Business Applications and Services from the cloud to the edge of the network
• Modularity and simplicity to scale distributed IT environment
• Micro-service architecture for connected devices
• Ecosystem of other network function providers that allow CloudWAN to flexibly fit into an existing enterprise IT landscape without disrupting prior infrastructure investments
• Seamless unification of disparate network deployments
• Site in a Box solution to standardize network technologies across diverse global locations or to streamline complex networks across various business units 

BENEFITS 
COST:

• Reduce setup and service costs of network products and apps
• Reduce bandwidth cost by enabling alternate transport networks
  COMPLEXITY:
• Easier device management with network functions as a service on a single appliance
• Reduce burden on overloaded subject matter experts
• Easier network monitoring, debugging, and troubleshooting
  CONTROL:
• Improve ability to rapidly deploy centralized changes to the network edges

CloudWAN Services from NTT Group Companies

Internet Solutions (South Africa): CloudWAN Launch on June 8th
CloudWAN is a unified, virtual WAN and network function solution that simplifies the way you manage your network. The network essentially functions as a service on a single device, so you need just one device at each location instead of a complicated arrangement of network hardware. With CloudWAN, you no longer need to ship network devices, servers and applications to new sites. Even your skilled engineers can stay where they are and set up site-to-site VPN remotely.

 "It is critical that we provide our clients with a high performance, highly resilient network solution," said Saki Missaikos, Managing Director, Internet Solutions. "Having an open ecosystem available to develop an adaptable platform that can morph along with rapidly developing technology changes and market needs is critical. Leveraging NTT i³'s CloudWAN SD-WAN controller and ecosystem allows us to offer a high speed, reliable enterprise service to local enterprises."

For more information on CloudWAN from Internet Solutions, visit https://www.is.co.za/

NTT PC Communications (Japan)
Master'sONE CloudWAN Launch on June 6th
NTT Communications group is promoting "SDx + M", and NTTPC has been developing related services as a member of the group. NTTPC launch "Master'sONE CloudWAN Service" suitable in the Japanese SME market empowered by NTTi³ CloudWAN technology.

NTTPC positioned the SD-WAN service as a next generation Network service. This service is terms of 3 features -- Flexibility, Agility and Security, provide a unified VPN service by overlaying various networks. This connects various Clouds, large and small business sites as necessary.

"As enterprise businesses move towards digitalization and cloud, NTT will continue to provide innovative solutions like CloudWAN which enable flexibility and agility, without compromising on performance," said Motoo Tanaka, President and CEO for NTT PC Communications.

For more information about Master'sONE CloudWAN, please visit https://cloudwan.nttpc.co.jp/

About NTT Innovation Institute, Inc. (NTT i³)
NTT Innovation Institute, Inc. (NTT i³) is the Silicon Valley-based innovation center for NTT Group, one of the world's largest ICT companies. Our approach to enterprise technology is driven by a commitment to discovering ambitious new ideas, developing them into robust technology platforms, and delivering them into the marketplace to be applied against significant and difficult industry, business, and human problems. 

NTT i³ accelerates the movement of innovation from an initial idea in the lab to impact in the marketplace through our unique access to NTT's global infrastructure and investment resources, a significant network of research labs, long and trusted relationships with customers, and an engaged global community of collaborators in both established enterprise companies and the startup community. For more information, please visit NTT i³ .

About Internet Solutions 
Internet Solutions (IS) is a South African company founded in 1993. Owned by Dimension Data, it is an Internet Protocol (IP) communications service provider on the African continent. The company provides connectivity services, cloud offerings as well as carrier services to corporate enterprises. Today, IS is at the forefront of Internet Protocol-based technologies and it builds solutions and services tailored to the increasingly complex demands of organizations across the enterprise and public sector.

Internet Solutions maintains its own tier one international network and its own network nodes in North America, Europe and Asia, where it interconnects with Internet backbone providers. The company lands this international bandwidth at multiple points in Africa. Internet Solutions provides services to 80 percent of companies listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. IS also has a presence in Kenya, Mozambique, Uganda, Mauritius, Tanzania, Nigeria, Angola and Ghana. More information can be found at https://www.is.co.za/

About NTT PC Communications
NTTPC Communications Incorporated (NTTPC), established in 1985 is a subsidiary of NTT Communications, is a network service and communication solution provider in Japanese telco market, The company has been the most strategic technology company of the group throughout of years. NTTPC launched the 1st ISP service of the NTT group, so called "InfoSphere" at 1995, and also launched the 1st Internet Data Center and server hosting services of Japan so called "WebARENA" at 1997. NTTPC have always started something new in ICT market.

"Master'sONE" is the VPN service based on the technology and skills related to the Internet services. In recent years NTTPC has grown a broadband VPN service that makes full use of the features of "FLET'S," Japanese broadband Network. In addition, and has been providing functionally and various services that can be combined with these network services.

For more information, please visit http://www.nttpc.co.jp/