CHANNEL PARTNERS CONFERENCE & EXPO — NTT Communications’ (Booth 136 and a Meeting Room Sponsor) managed services and infrastructure outsourcing services have gained significant traction with recent wins with partners, including a data center upgrade and expansion, and a global end-to-end managed infrastructure deal.

The announcement is being made at this week’s Channel Partners Conference & Expo. NTT Com launched its Global Solutions Channel Partner Program, an indirect sales program tailored to the U.S. market, two-and-a-half years ago. The program offers “uniquely attractive terms, significant prospects for international expansion, and the opportunity to leverage the assets of NTT Com,” the company said.

Rob Westervelt, vice president and general manager of indirect global solutions for NTT America, tells Channel Partners his company is moving more into as-a-service applications, including infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), managed services, SD-WAN on the network side and IT outsourcing.

“Once you start to get into managing the WAN, you can start moving into managing the LAN and managing data-center assets, so we are really moving heavily into a managed services/outsourcing model,” he said. “So our big focus now is to try and educate, and get as many of the subagents as possible to realize what we can do and kind of show them where the revenue is in this type of opportunity.”

The two recent multimillion-dollar deals were an upgrade and expansion of a third-party data center, and a global managed infrastructure offering for a biotech company.{ad}

Tennessee Data Systems (TDS), a regional provider of enterprise data storage services, faced a customer base looking for new and more cost-effective ways to manage increasing data storage requirements, but was limited in how effectively it could meet this demand. In partnership with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Integris Solutions Group, NTT Com designed a hybrid, software-defined cloud storage offering that expanded capacity, increased capabilities and boosted reliability and uptime. With Integris serving as the VAR for HPE, NTT Com structured the package of technology, infrastructure and managed services as a 48-month agreement.

“Our goal is to become more of a managed service provider, so by taking this opportunity and making it into a managed service and an offering, it is the model that we wanted to go after,” Westervelt said. “We had been working with HPE for a little while and this was actually the model that we really wanted to come up with. So this is what we will be doing going forward. We are collaborating with HPE on some other large opportunities that are very similar in a managed-service arena and it happens to be storage as well. So we’ve probably got about three or four opportunities that we’re working with HPE and this partner on. But we’re also taking this out to channel partners as well.”

In the second deal, a biotech spinoff starting with no ICT infrastructure was considering a capital expenditure-intensive purchase when NTT Com’s indirect channel sales team met with it and changed the conversation from hardware investment, to managed services and outsourced infrastructure, the company said. Technologies in play include SD-WAN, UCaaS, NFV, MPLS, colocation, NTT Security and more.

“One of the pleasant things that we’ve seen recently is that so many of the channel partners have some really nice size logo accounts that are looking for a managed service offering,” Westervelt said. “Whether that’s taking over their help desk or managing their LAN and WAN services, there [are] a lot of partners out there that today are the trusted adviser for these companies, and I think as we’re starting to educate people on what our capabilities are, we’re getting a lot of opportunities that are very similar to the Tennessee Data Systems opportunity.”