After being part of the NTT Com group for almost seven years, Atlas IT is changing its name to NTT Com Managed Services. While the name change means little to Atlas IT or its customers, it is hopefully the start of NTT Com beginning to better realign all the businesses that it owns.
Integrating Atlas IT into NTT Com provides a business with extensive experience of remote managed services. According to the press release: “NTT Com intends to develop a strong leadership position in global managed network, infrastructure and applications services to augment its network, data centre and cloud services.” Atlas IT already delivers all of these along with Cloud Migration Assistance.
Damian Skendrovic, who will take the post of CEO NTT Com Managed Services, added: “After several years of successful growth, I am delighted that Atlas IT has been chosen to lead the global expansion of NTT Com’s managed services business.” What will be interesting is how much NTT Com will now invest in this new NTT Com Managed Services business and how it will promote it across the wider group.
The latter does raise some questions for NTT Com. Among those is when will it integrate the managed services assets of Dimension Data with this new business? At present, Dimension Data has been allowed to run as a self-contained business under the wider NTT Group banner. This move increases the overlap between NTT Com and Dimension Data especially as NTT now sees managed services as a key revenue growth area.
Conclusion
While NTT has acquired a number of companies especially in cloud computing, it has been extremely slow to bring them together. This has meant that economies that would have been expected from the acquisitions have yet to be realised. In addition there is a lot of overlap where the companies compete against each other and fail to offer services from other parts of the group.
While this move won’t solve all of that it does bring the conflict between NTT Com and Dimension Data into focus. It will be interesting to see how this is resolved and whether it will result in some greater internal realignment of assets across group companies.
