NTT boosts cloud services focus with acquisition of Centerstance

Japanese telecom giant NTT (NYSE: NTT) has expanded its strategic focus on cloud computing by acquiring Centerstance, a consulting company that specializes in cloud-enabled business transformation solutions, the two companies announced Tuesday. Centerstance will become a wholly owned NTT subsidiary.

No financial terms of the acquisition were announced.

"NTT is focused on becoming the leading partner of choice to help clients transform their business as they move to the cloud," Hiroo Unoura, NTT's president-CEO said in a news release. "Through this M&A, NTT will be able to strengthen its consulting capability and migration capability which are necessary to achieve a cloud migration supporting customer needs. Additionally, it will be a driving power for NTT to approach global cloud business especially overseas as a pioneer providing cloud service immediately taking in leading edge technologies without being bounded by existing systems and technologies."

NTT is using a group of companies, Dimension Data, NTT Communications and NTT DATA to extend its reach into the cloud with an "extensive portfolio of cloud solutions... Enabled by capabilities that span the full applications lifecycle and managed infrastructure services" of "one of the world's largest IP backbones and a network of over 200 data centers," the carrier said in the news release.

Centerstance, a Salesforce.com Platinum partner in the United States, described itself as a "fast-growing consulting company specializing in helping companies identify and move key business processes to the cloud leveraging the Salesforce.com platform."

Combining with NTT will "fuel our ability to execute our growth strategy toward global expansion and bring new integration capability to our customers in all corners of the world while still providing an exceptionally high level of service to our customers," Arne Kainu, Centerstance's managing partner said in the news release.

For more:
- see this news release

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