NTT Data is planning to make huge investments in India. In the last 10-15 years, since 2011, it has invested about $3 billion in India. “Over the next three years, we are planning to add another $1.5 billion of investment in India,” explains Roli Agarwal, chief, CEO Office, strategy & sales transformation, NTT Data. “Most of this will go into data centre infrastructure, building campuses, talent development, AI and other innovation technologies like photonics. There was a large investment that went into data centres and, of course, marine cables. We now have landing stations in Mumbai and Chennai.” Agarwal is involved with the innovation centres, hiring and developing talent and getting some of the assets like platforms, in which they have to invest.
“With the new data centre, we have about 350 megawatts of capacity live,” adds Agarwal. “We are planning to get another 200 at least, which will be coming live in the near future. And our campuses and data centres are in Mumbai, NCR, Kolkata and Chennai.” She is looking to grow the business in India to about a billion by 2030. “More than the growth, we want India to be our innovation champion. These innovations are going around, whether it is in AI or in sustainable infrastructure, whether that is data centre infrastructure, sustainable networks, for example, an orthodontics network (IOWN). We are making huge investments in AI.”
NTT is training people in AI across the world. In India, they are doing differential investments – like training on specific technologies – and it is making them use AI. For example, the software engineering teams have to use AI in their day-to-day work; the BPO teams also have to use it. At the same time, NTT wants to help clients in India realise the potential of AI. “We have helped an FMCG manufacturer in India. They had medical products, and their quality had variability. We used AI to solve that problem and improve the quality. There were some raw material parameters that you have to match with machine parameters, as also environment parameters. All three together give you a combination that has the right output quality.”
In India, NTT does primarily four things. First is the digital infrastructure business, which means data centres and marine cable. Then it has the IT services business for serving Indian clients. Third, it has a delivery and innovation hub for the world. From India, it serves clients across the world in delivery and innovations. And then it has a small payments business, which is directly from Japan. In India, there are about 40,000 people working on these.
“Our managed services include systems integration, business process services, application development, cloud services, data and analytics,” adds Agarwal. “All the services that we provide, we deliver them out of India as well”.
Inorganic strategy
“Of course, there is a lot of organic growth as well, but we do a lot of acquisitions,” informs Agarwal. “That is one of our growth engines. Then there are the industry-leading partnerships, be they with the three hyper-scalers, enterprise platforms like ServiceNow, Salesforce or AI partnerships like OpenAI, Mistral. We do a lot of partnerships, and a big growth channel for us is going to market jointly with these partners. And, the last one is M&A. We do strategic, targeted M&As. Especially in the last few years, we have been more intentional about the M&As.” Most of it is funded by the parent company in Japan, she adds. They have investment funds. NTT as a group spends about $3.5 billion every year on innovation. Some of the funding comes from innovation, some from other sources, but that is a $100 billion business. The strategy was to acquire companies and grow by acquisition. Since then, NTT has acquired more than 100 companies.