Cisco and NTT Announce 5G Collaboration Agreement

Cisco and NTT Ltd. have announced plans to collaborate on private 5G adoption across the automotive, logistics, healthcare, retail, and public sectors.

The two companies plan to jointly bring to market new products and managed services that will enable enterprise customers to facilitate private 5G deployments and to accelerate edge connectivity through NTT’s Managed Private 5G solution, combined with Intel hardware to support private 5G integration into pre-existing LAN/WAN/Cloud infrastructure.

Anticipated features include Industry 4.0 capabilities such as push-to-talk ‘walkie talkie’ communications, automated guided vehicles (AGVs), always connected PCs (for digital frontline workers), and machine vision (e.g., predictive maintenance, PPE detection).

Cisco and NTT have already begun coordination on several customer deployments. In addition, the two companies are planning to power computer vision for product quality analysis, predictive analytics for manufacturing equipment functionality and maintenance, and autonomous vehicles for moving product on the factory floor, leveraging NTT’s IoT connected solutions.

“Together with NTT, we aim to help our enterprise customers accelerate digital transformation, with the power of 5G and Wi-Fi across IT and OT operations,” said Masum Mir, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Provider Mobility, Cisco Networking. “Our cloud-managed private 5G offers customers seamless integration with their Enterprise network fabric along with common policy and zero trust security architecture, helping to reduce technical, financial, and operational risks associated with managing 5G networks, so they can focus on driving business agility and efficiency.”

“This is a natural expansion of the cutting-edge capabilities and services NTT brings to market to help our global clients modernize their businesses. NTT and Cisco are building on our mutual commitment to build a simple to manage pure private network solution,” said Shahid Ahmed, Executive Vice President, New Ventures & Innovation at NTT. “As a premier systems integrator partner to Cisco, the two companies are well positioned to deliver a secure, reliable, and future-proof private 5G network for our joint enterprise customers with global footprints.”

For Cisco’s Private 5G, NTT will provide network infrastructure design, deployment, run operations, use case development, device sourcing, compatibility, and end-to-end testing.

Channel Impact^®
The move is intended to help accelerate digital transformation; a key profit center for channel partners.