Microsoft Corporation and Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation to Form Multi-Year Strategic Alliance for Accelerating Digital Transformations
February 18, 2020 at 01:50 pm EST
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Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation and Microsoft Corporation announced a multi-year strategic agreement that would provide consistent and secure solutions for digital transformations. This alliance would combine the ICT infrastructure and cyber security expertise of NTT with the reliable cloud platform and artificial intelligence technology of Microsoft. The main initiatives of this alliance comprise of the formation of a Global Digital Fabric, development of solutions for digital enterprise using Microsoft Azure and invention of next-generation technologies in the field of digital twin computing and all-photonics network. The Global Digital Fabric is created from Microsoft's Cloud platform and NTTs ICT infrastructure, which combines the strengths of the two companies to develop a sustainable and secure environment for acceleration of digital solutions by enterprises. Digital enterprise solutions are fabricated on Microsoft Azure to securely operate from the enterprise to the edge and then to the cloud. It includes the use of advanced analytics for cyber security threat intelligence, digital work place solutions, social robotics with relational artificial intelligence and knowledge discovery and management. The third initiative, innovation of next-generation technologies, explores the research and development in digital twin computing and all-photonics network. This is a part of the Innovative Optical and Wireless Network (IOWN) concept by NTT. The main idea of this initiative is to provide natural communication between nature, technology and people. Further, this would support optical-based networking with advanced platform for information processing.
Microsoft Corporation is the world's leader in the design, development and marketing of operating systems and software programs for PC's and servers. The group also builds and sells computer equipment. Net sales break down by activity as follows:
- sale of operating systems and application development tools (47.9%): primarily for servers (Azure, SQL Server, Windows Server, Visual Studio, System Center, GitHub, etc.) and (Windows);
- development of cloud-based software applications (23%): programs for productivity (Microsoft 365; Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Publisher and Access), integrated management and customer relationship management (Dynamics 365), online file sharing and management (OneDrive), and unified and collaborative communications (Skype and Microsoft Teams);
- sale of video gaming hardware and software (7.3%) : mainly Xbox;
- enterprise services (3.6%);
- sale of computers, tablets and accessories (2.6%);
- other (15.6%).
The United States accounts for 50.4% of net sales.