NTT DATA Group Corporation, headquartered in Japan and employing more than 190,000 people in 50 countries globally, is an innovative provider of IT and business services. Its Singapore subsidiary, NTT DATA Singapore, works with major international and local organizations across all industries, including providers of critical national infrastructure.
Pranay Anand, VP of Innovation, has ultimate responsibility for ensuring positive outcomes for the public sector and enterprises in Singapore, and he works closely with external partners to build new platforms and go-to-market solutions. A key focus of his is to ensure that internal teams have the right toolsets and platforms to deliver world-class services. Investments in internal capabilities also feed into solutions built and managed on behalf of clients, enabling NTT DATA Singapore to streamline its solution delivery.
At-a-Glance
NTT DATA Singapore delivers transformative solutions to some of the country’s leading public and private organizations. To support greater speed, agility and cost-effectiveness, the company has standardized and secured containerized services with SUSE Rancher Prime as its preferred platform. Backed by SUSE Consulting and SUSE Support services, this enables NTT DATA Singapore to deliver transformational value faster for its customers.
Problem: managing Kubernetes complexity, scalability, resources and vendor lock-in
NTT DATA Singapore is focused on transforming itself using the most sophisticated innovations to ensure it has strong foundations in place when offering transformative solutions to customers. The company also simplifies technology operations whenever possible to free up resources to reinvest in solving clients’ challenges. These objectives drew NTT DATA Singapore toward a containerization-first strategy based on open source Kubernetes technology.
“For ease of operation and management, we are moving to containers and hybrid cloud,” says Anand. “Containers are easy to migrate between platforms, giving us vital architectural flexibility to support clients on their own modernization journeys.”
NTT DATA Singapore began to build a container platform, but as its Kubernetes footprint grew, it ran into complexity and resource challenges, given the complex nature of Kubernetes environments. Managing containerized workloads at scale proved harder than anticipated, raising operational costs and making it difficult to scale applications to meet client needs. Furthermore, the chosen Kubernetes solution imposed artificial constraints, potentially locking NTT DATA Singapore into reliance on a single vendor.
“If we’re responsible for delivering a business outcome for a client, and we’re free to choose the technology platform, Rancher Prime with SUSE Security is the default option.”
Why Rancher Prime and SUSE Security?
NTT DATA Singapore conducted detailed technology evaluations before selecting Rancher Prime as its strategic containerization platform. The organization found Rancher Prime to be less resource-intensive, easier to use and faster to deploy than the other management platforms on the market. Rancher Prime also gave NTT DATA Singapore the flexibility it needed for heterogeneous cloud environments.
“Rancher Prime stood out by providing a simple, resource-efficient platform without vendor lock-in,” explains Anand.
NTT DATA Singapore’s clients run some of the country’s most critical public services, so security is a vital consideration. The company chose to complement Rancher Prime with SUSE Security, which provides continuous monitoring and security for containerized workloads throughout the entire development lifecycle.
Why SUSE Consulting?
Based on his team’s initial experience with containers, Anand recognized that the single biggest adoption challenge was around skills. The proposed solution from SUSE included consulting hours, giving NTT DATA Singapore access to SUSE Consulting’s cloud native expertise.
“SUSE offered a flexible bucket of consulting hours as part of the Rancher Prime solution,” says Anand. “The SUSE consultants provide deep subject-matter expertise in all things Kubernetes, helping my technical people bridge the skills gap and gain confidence.”
NTT DATA Singapore also works with SUSE Consulting to review designs and architectures it develops against best practices.
The impact of SUSE solutions
SUSE enables enterprise-scale operations
Rancher Prime and SUSE Security enabled NTT DATA Singapore to achieve enterprise scale in its containerized environments for the first time. SUSE manages NTT DATA Singapore’s most mission-critical workloads while still giving it the freedom of choice to work with other platforms, thanks to SUSE’s truly open source architecture.
“Looking at what we’re doing at scale and where we’re heading, Rancher Prime is at the center of the picture,” comments Anand. “We trust Rancher Prime to run truly critical infrastructure in Singapore — if these systems went down, our names would be in all the newspapers.”
SUSE accelerates project delivery
NTT DATA Singapore uses SUSE technologies to manage and secure Kubernetes containers across both internal and client-facing environments. In some cases, these environments are owned and hosted by NTT DATA Singapore. For other clients, the solution provider may build containerized landscapes on internal networks.
“If we’re responsible for delivering a business outcome for a client, and we’re free to chose the technology platform, Rancher Prime with SUSE Security is the default option,” says Anand. “Speed and agility are at the forefront: the quicker we can deliver, the quicker we can create value.”
SUSE promotes cost efficiency
By standardizing on Rancher Prime and SUSE Security for containerizing both internal and external solutions, NTT DATA Singapore now has a single focus for investing in expertise.
“Standardization helps me keep TCO low,” says Anand. “The more I consolidate internal skill sets, the easier I sleep at night.”
The containerized architecture with built-in security from SUSE also makes it easier for NTT DATA Singapore to adopt artificial intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) and reserve human intervention for the most complex challenges.
The impact of SUSE Consulting and SUSE Support
Clients typically engage NTT DATA Singapore to deliver business outcomes that meet defined SLAs. The organization prefers to engage with its partners in a similar way: based on overall outcomes rather than individual technologies. In combination, SUSE Consulting and SUSE Support provide a trusted go-to resource for NTT DATA Singapore that helps the company to plan, deliver, run and manage critical solutions for its clients.
“To meet our clients’ high expectations, I need to be able to draw on expertise at the snap of my fingers,” says Anand. “The ability to access SUSE experts who built the products and who support other clients across different geographies is a vital benefit.”
Supplementing the bigger-picture, training and guidance from SUSE Consulting and SUSE Support provides rapid resolutions to emerging issues on internal or client Kubernetes environments.
What’s next for NTT DATA Singapore?
As the innovation lead for his organization, Anand aims to focus less on products and technologies and more on transformative outcomes. To this end, he selects partners like SUSE that provide stable, easy-to-manage technology, leaving his employees free to concentrate on driving growth.
“As we look to supercharge our business, we see SUSE as a part of that growth journey,” says Anand. “With SUSE, we can deliver cheaper, faster, better and more securely for our clients. At the same time, we can reduce our TCO and cut time to revenue.”
He concludes: “Holistically, it's the ease of doing business with SUSE that has guided our choice. If I can solve more complex problems through this relationship, I can deliver greater value to my clients.”