The big question of distributed business is how to get data from A to B to Z, securely, speedily and accessibly.

On the surface it sounds easy: After all, “it’s just two different data points, connect them together, make it secure, make it visible, create transparency,” said Simon Walsh, (pictured) chief executive officer, NTT Ltd. Americas. “But, we all know that the world is full of technical debt, legacy systems and platforms … and those things don’t modernize themselves overnight.”

Walsh spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during Upgrade 2020, the NTT Research Summit. They discussed the importance of creating secure, accessible and efficient data management within a distributed digital workplace. (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following content has been condensed for clarity.]

How is NTT helping its customers as they respond to the realities that we see today and move along the journey of digital transformation?

Walsh: The topic we see as very prevalent is the distributed nature of the workforce. Obviously, there’s always been a field workforce, and we’ve had customer relationship management and other systems that were built for a distributed workforce. But now we have to think about how to handle supply chain management systems, our human resources systems, the profit and loss [reporting], and all of the activities that a business undertakes daily but now with an entirely distributed workforce. And it’s quite abnormal.

We’re doing a lot of work with our clients relating to digital transformation, but really it’s about how do I join data from system A to a system F in a distributed manner and, most importantly, securely, timely and in an interface that is usable. So, what I’m seeing is that digital transformation is really about how do we handle distributed data, distributed decision-making, and how do we do that in a secure manner and through an interface that is a user friendly.

We are dependent as citizens, businesses and nations on technology now. And how data is available, how we secure it, how we make sure that it’s encrypted is absolutely going to be critical.

That number one priority is, of course, security. It is absolutely front and center still. But are there any other key learnings or prioritization changes you’re seeing?

Walsh: What we’ve really seen as a prioritization has been how to get information to users — whether the user is a customer or whether the user is an employee. There are examples of companies who had online retail, which is great. But now they’ve got to do curbside pickup because they’ve got inventory in the stores but the stores can’t open. So what you’ve seen is a reprioritization to say: ‘Well when we look at inventory management and the supply chain systems, are we factoring the inventory we have in a store to also be seen as inventory across all the stores?’

So, in fact, what we’ve really got now is a distributed warehouse. We’ve got inventory in the warehouse at wholesale ready for distribution. And then we’ve got inventory in a store, retail ready for consumer consumption. But we don’t want that to be separate inventory; we want that to be holistic. Then how do we enable any consumer anywhere to be able to arrange for curbside pickup, which we didn’t use to do, because we would come into the store or arrange for mail order?

So we’ve seen prioritization for really how to take advantage of this. It comes back to how this word distributed is very simple in a principal, but everything is now working on a new dynamic.

NTT obviously has a strong network component to its businesses. Help us understand the services that are important there, what you’re working on with customers and how the distributed way of work has transformed some of those activities? 

Walsh: It’s quite amusing to me that we’ve been, for years now, talking about cloud-on-demand subscription services. And actually the one asset that you need to really enable cloud is the network, but it’s historically been the least cloud-like that you could possibly imagine. Because you still need to specify a physical connection; you still need to specify a bandwidth value. You still need to specify the number of devices you’ve got to attach to it.

I think this is really a monstrous change that we’re going to experience and really are experiencing … network as a service. We talk about IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, but what happened to NaaS? I mean, really? Did we just think that everything was about computer and software? The network is the underpinner.

So really we see a big change, and where we’ve been very busy is the network as a service, enabling customers to have dynamic reallocation of resources on the network so that they can prioritize traffic, prioritize content, and prioritize events. We’ve been very busy the last few months in really building out much more dynamic network-as-a-service solutions — you know, the cloud network. And I think the whole software-defined network agenda has materially accelerated.

And then another area [of transformation] has just been the phenomenal shift to [internet protocol] voice and software and actually almost the deletion of the phone in its entirety. Everybody is using Teams or Skype or Google Hangouts as their collaboration mechanism, and then we’re providing all the underlying transportation layer but as IP voice. That creates a much more integrated collaboration experience, and it creates a cost saving because you’re taking away the classic voice services.

What are some of the areas and pockets of research we will see at the Upgrade 2020 Summit that are most exciting to you?

Walsh: What I like about our event is the investment that we make to work with the scientific community, academia, and really invest in forward-looking, future-proofing [research]. How physics and different technologies might play a role in the future.

Some of these investments and some of this research yields commercial products, and some of it doesn’t. But it’s still a very valuable opportunity for us to really look at where technology is going. Take bio sciences and healthcare. When you think about the pandemic, are there things that we can do with simulations and technologies in the future that really would give us a greater comprehension and ability to accelerate understanding, accelerate testing, and then maybe contribute to the health and welfare of society? And I think that’s really quite an exciting area for us.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Upgrade 2020, the NTT Research Summit. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Upgrade 2020, the NTT Research Summit. Neither NTT Research, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE