Top VARs Q&A: Paolo Masselli, NTT Ltd
NTT Ltd is now a $1bn business in the UK, according to UK&I CEO of 15th-ranked Top VAR
This interview features in CRN Top VARs 2020, which you can read here
Dimension Data and 30 other NTT businesses merged last summer to form NTT Ltd. How is the integration going?
In the UK, we brought together eight companies, the two biggest being Dimension Data and NTT Communications. And we then have a number of affiliates, which are not fully integrated right now.
We've set up a very close working relationship [with the affiliates]. If I went back 12 to 18 months, we were very fragmented and never engaged with each other, even though we were part of the same group. You would have found potentially 10 client managers sitting at one client. What we've done in the first 12 months is make sure we are taking one single portfolio to market and engaging with clients in a much more structured way.
The strategy for us to integrate all of those different organisations into our business proper will happen over the next 12 to 18 months.
NTT Ltd ranks 15th in Top VARs, based on an historic revenue number of £258m. How big will the combined business be?
With Dimension Data and NTT Com together we're closer to £480m, but that excludes any of the affiliates - for instance, NTT Security, Global Networks etc. There's a bit of a pass through to us, but at the moment, we're not really taking the full revenues on that. Together, we probably do $1bn in the UK.
How has trading been in 2020?
We've had a reasonably tough year. The UK has been more affected in the area where we were the traditional Dimension Data business - with a value added reseller business - because a lot of clients have put projects on hold and are conserving as much cash as they can. They are moving a lot more to as-a-service type solutions, and there are a lot of upgrades to legacy networks - from MPLS to software defined. We are trading at around 85-odd per cent of our budget, so it's not terrible.
What are your priorities for 2021?
Internally, we are building momentum to work a lot more closely with our sister companies and affiliates. We have shared client lists with our sister companies, NTT Data, everis, Data Services, Itelligence etc. We've agreed how we actually approach each of the clients, and we've come up with a joint go to market for each of those pairs of companies. So for example, with Itelligence, how do we provide cloud services to SAP organisations as they move from on premise to S4 HANA?
Historically, Dimension Data was very much an SI and VAR that actually delivered solutions, but on premise. So the assets were owned by the client. Now what we're doing is changing that completely to either put them on our platforms or manage those assets on their behalf. Moving forward, we're moving towards a much bigger managed services-type organisation, delivering those solutions on our platforms. Globally, the standard that we've been set is that 60 per cent of our revenues need to be from as a service. In the UK we're almost at 60 per cent anyway, so we're going to push up towards 80 per cent.