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You may not think about it all that often, but there are a lot of other clouds open for business besides those run by the Big Ten (ranked by 2015 revenue): Salesforce, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, Oracle, Google, SAP, Workday, Citrix and CenturyLink.
One of those others, Japan’s NTT Communications, which opened its enterprise cloud business a few years ago, announced March 1 it has expanded functionality to include free connectivity between platforms, an all-in-one management portal and a list of other offerings.
NTT’s upgraded Enterprise Cloud is now immediately available in Japan and will be rolled out in the U.K., Singapore, U.S., Australia, Hong Kong and Germany later this year.
NTT Com said it is launching this to compete head on in the market with the others noted above, and to help enterprises meet the requirements of digital transformation across multiple aspects of businesses in order to spur growth.
Enterprises driven by mobile, social, big data and IoT initiatives are deploying cloud-native applications and shifting toward a DevOps culture that supports rapid innovation. NTT Com says its enhanced Enterprise Cloud, based on the OpenStack system, provides a full-service platform for both traditional and cloud-native IT, as well as network connectivity, colocation service and third-party cloud services.
New and enhanced capabilities of the NTT Enterprise Cloud, as described by the company, include:
—Hosted Private Cloud: Enterprise Cloud’s hosted private cloud now consists of dedicated bare-metal servers with the automation, pay-as-you-go flexibility and options of a multi-hypervisor environment, including VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V. It also provides a highly flexible internal network, which facilitates the re-use of on-premises network architecture in the cloud.
—Enterprise-class Multi-tenant Cloud for Cloud-Native IT: The Enterprise Cloud now features a secure and highly reliable, enterprise-class multi-tenant cloud based on the OpenStack architecture, which gives customers an industry-standard open API to control the cloud in an automated manner. In addition, by incorporating Cloud Foundry, open source Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) software, the cloud provides PaaS for agile application development and operational efficiency. This gives customers enterprise-class service quality as well as effective management of agile and Dev-Ops oriented application development.
—Hybrid Cloud Environment: The NTT cloud’s multi-tenant cloud and hosted private cloud are connected at Layer 2 with SDN (software-defined networking), which gives customers the power to flexibly configure the network components (virtual server, bare-metal server, firewall, load balancer) running on a complex on-premises environment in the same network segment.
—Free Connection between Cloud Platforms: The new NTT cloud platform is connected with a 10Gbps closed network, which is free of charge. In addition, connectivity between Enterprise Cloud platforms and data centers is provided at competitive prices globally, utilizing NTT Com’s infrastructure as a telecom carrier.
—Cloud Management Platform for Full Visibility and IT Governance: NTT Com is launching CMP for the efficient management and unified control of both Enterprise Cloud and third-party providers’ clouds, including Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. CMP also enables customer management and operation of hybrid clouds and meets the IT governance, cost control, security management and automated ICT operational requirements needed to successfully execute a cloud-first digital transformation strategy companywide.
Some of the new functions NTT Com plans to launch later this year for enterprises include SAP HANA, virtual private PaaS and enhanced cloud management capabilities to further support digital transformation projects, the company said.