Cisco Live: NTT

Shahid Ahmed is executive vice president of new ventures and innovation for NTT, one of Cisco’s largest partners.

Ahmed pointed to two trends at Cisco that NTT has its eyes on. 

The first is Cisco’s efforts around private 5G. Cisco earlier this year unveiled its private 5G-as-a-service offering, which it developed in concert with Open Radio Access Network (ORAN) providers JMA and Airspan.

For NTT, which launched a global private LTE/5G network-as-a-service platform last summer, Cisco’s offering could be an opportunity.

“We’re looking forward to taking a look at it, doing a test drive and making sure it works with our managed services capability,” Ahmed told Channel Futures.

Ahmed also pointed to Cisco’s partnership with Ford around autonomous vehicles. Although NTT wasn’t involved in the deal to integrate Webex on the Ford F-150 Lightning, Ahmed said Ford’s growing partnership with Cisco represents a rising tide of sorts.

Ford is one of NTT’s largest clients, and NTT serves it in the area of factory automation and IT operations.

“That allows us to be an even more productive partner for Ford, mainly because we do so much business with Cisco,” he said.