NTT Ltd recently announced the promotion of Francis Ng as the Head of Sales for the Malaysia operations. Francis will now oversee the front-line sales managers and drive strategy execution, sales targets and performance across the sales teams through best practices. He is tasked to establish and grow the team and pull through large scale projects while articulating the value of NTT’s portfolio of products and solutions to the market. His extensive experience in leading with customer excellence and ability to motivate large and disparate teams has contributed to his continued success at NTT.
We had a chat with Francis to share more of his moving forward plan in this exclusive interview.
Francis, with the recent announcement, that you will be now leading sales at NTT Malaysia, what will your key focus areas be while driving sales and team performance in the initial few months?
As a leader in technology and business solutions, we intend to help our clients transform their business digitally so they can better compete in their respective verticals. We are and will continue to look for ways to help them accelerate growth and innovate existing and new business models. Our extensive services include digital business consulting, technology and managed services for cybersecurity, applications, workplace, cloud, data centre and networks, all supported by our deep industry expertise and innovation.
We will also look to build sustainable pipelines in order to drive profitability for the company as we continue to deploy technologies and services that advance social and environmental prosperity with our partners, vendors, and clients. In addition to that, we will also focus on engaging in deeper relationships by positioning our high-value services, as well as continuing to adopt and adapt to the new norm of doing business with our clients
How is NTT planning to penetrate & build into new sectors and segments with its valuable portfolio of products and technology solutions?
We take pride in being a reliable partner for our clients. Using our proven expertise and technological know-how, we are able to assist our clients in leveraging digital technology to connect data, things, and people in order to gain insights, identify target markets and capitalise on opportunities.
In terms of penetrating and building into new sectors, we will definitely identify new target markets in financial services, digital banking, and manufacturing first and will also constantly be on the lookout for new resources to focus on untapped accounts as it will help our business scale up and stay on our current growth trajectory. We believe that recognising where there is a disconnect between supply and demand can open our business up to new opportunities.
Collaborations with strategy alliances/partners in the pursuit of new opportunities is another strategy we are focusing on in an industry where networking is essential. We will also work with clients to capitalise on emerging opportunities, improve industries, and shape a better society in which we can all live and work. We will, of course, implement new digital marketing strategies to reach out to new clients as well. The focus will also be on platform-based services for network, security, data centre, and cloud, among other things, to enable AI, machine learning, and digital business innovation.
On a local level, we continue to see a demand for automation and hybrid cloud services which is why we believe that our industry-leading digital backbone, secure multi-cloud platform, and broad portfolio of global services further accelerate transformation, especially for our local businesses.
NTT has recently been announced Leader in the 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Network Services, Global; which are those factors you attribute to this achievement?
The report recognised NTT as a leader, citing our completeness of vision and ability to execute. Gartner also evaluated a variety of our networking capabilities within their 2022 Magic Quadrant for Network Services, Global and 2022 Critical Capabilities Report for Network Services, Global.
Businesses need to continue to evolve and change, primarily through the adoption of cloud services, hybrid working environments and expanded connected devices/IoT. Hence, it will be vital for clients to deploy and leverage a secure, high-performance cloud-to-edge network fabric to support their
businesses’ transformation and agility. Gartner positioned NTT as a Leader in this Magic Quadrant after evaluating 18 vendors. We believe the recognition is due to our unique and comprehensive vision, strategy, and product portfolio, as well as our ongoing investment in innovation and service expansion.
The breadth and depth of our agile, secure, and high-performing end-to-end solutions which include software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) and SD-WiFi work-from-home solutions, and our SD-WAN and SD-LAN for our clients’ cloud-first strategy were among the factors that helped us become the leading global technology and business services, provider.
Our trusted client partnership has enabled us to win significant deals in SD-WAN and the global networks. We provide clients with a dynamic and responsive software-defined infrastructure and network as a platform for innovation by removing complexity, simplifying our operations, and embracing automation. We also have a strong global delivery team with high capability in project delivery and execution, which easily assists our clients in attaining efficiency in order to achieve digitalization.
Having a diverse product and service portfolio, which are the ones in the portfolio that will be your top priority factoring market demand, NTT vision, mission, focus on visibility of NTT innovation and service expansion & others?
NTT makes full use of various business resources and capabilities, such as R&D, ICT infrastructure, and personnel, to address social issues by promoting digital transformation and CSR through collaborations with our partners. We believe that people are at the heart of everything we do, and we seek people with exceptional service, technical expertise, and intelligence. We strive to be a valuable presence for our customers, shareholders, communities, employees, and all other stakeholders by accelerating internal reforms for a new and more open, global, and innovative NTT.
Our top priority will be in aligning with our newly defined services towers like Managed Network Campus Services (MNCS) and Managed Cloud Instructure Services (MCIS). Through automation, AIOps-enabled platforms, and analytics, our Managed Campus Networks accelerate technology and operations transformation. Our managed services platform, which provides automated operational efficiency and predictive analytics; our highly-skilled, certified, and globally available people; strategic multivendor relationships; and our network and data centre infrastructure can serve as the foundation of network strategy. Also, our cloud-first approach assists our clients in defining and deploying the appropriate combination of cloud solutions to meet their business needs. We have over two decades of experience defining, migrating, and managing cloud environments of all sizes, as well as extensive knowledge of enterprise technologies such as Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft.
Apart from that, cybersecurity is another priority where we aim to safeguard the network & system information of our clients. NTT DATA emphasises cybersecurity countermeasures such as risk management, security upgrades, and compliance programmes. We have accumulated technical expertise that will help to secure enterprises against cybersecurity risks as a result of our long-standing efforts in research and development.
Our business approach enables businesses to leverage our expertise with a variety of platforms, including core business systems, hosting mission-critical enterprise applications, and integration with third-party applications. Businesses will also have peace of mind knowing that our data centre solutions are planned, built, and supported by the industry-leading network, infrastructure, security, and application engineer teams
