In May 2008, NTT Group adopted its new Medium-Term Strategy entitled “Road to Service Creation Business Group” and announced that it will create and deploy broadband and ubiquitous services using a full IP network infrastructure by approximately the fiscal year ending March 31, 2011.
We interviewed Representative Director and Senior Executive Vice President Hiroo Unoura, who is also the Director of the Strategic Business Development Division responsible for NTT Group's business strategy, asking about the foregoing expansion of business based on the Medium-Term Strategy, and in particular about the development and commercialization of services that capitalize on the unique characteristics of the NGN and NTT's global businesses.

Please discuss how NTT Group's business is expected to expand based on the Medium-Term Strategy.

NTT Group will create and deploy broadband and ubiquitous services using its full IP network infrastructure to serve its customers. Specific actions will include the expansion of businesses in the following four areas of strategic growth, each promoting the transformation of NTT Group's business portfolio to one centered on IP and solutions businesses: (1) expansion of network services, including NGN and 3G services, and expansion of upper layer businesses; (2) expansion of solutions business for corporate customers; (3) promotion of new businesses by using the results of NTT Group's research and development, in addition to conducting business in the environmental, energy, and real estate fields; and (4) development of global businesses using the comprehensive strengths of the entire NTT Group.

Upper layer business has been one of the hot topics recently - how do you intend to develop this further?

In the upper layer business, optical access and NGN, which serves as the service base, has steadily grown and we intend to further enhance the development of services in collaboration with other business partners.
More specifically, though our involvement in the Next-Generation Services Joint Development Forum, for domestic customers, we would like to engage in the development of e-learning, where users can receive training through the web and for corporate customers, we are targeting the development of NGN applications for Software as a Service (SaaS)/Cloud, which provides software via the network, and in new business creation.

As one of the upper layer services, you mentioned e-learning - could you tell us about this in more detail?

e-leaning is an area of potential growth. We would like to provide new opportunities for “rich, flexible and fun” learning through broadband services. To this effect, we are planning to set up a new on-line learning service company and, in July 2009, we signed a business and capital tie-up agreement with Cerego Japan, which operates the 500,000 member educational Webpage “smart.fm”, with the goal of establishing a collaboration between the two companies in application development and other areas.
This is one of the results achieved from our collaboration with partner companies through the Next-generation Services Joint Development Forum. Going forward, we would like to aggressively develop new services and put them into business by strengthening both business and capital tie-ups with other companies through appropriate funding from NTT Investment Partners.

Will you let us know about your future global business?

In terms of our global business, we have been making many efforts to reinforce our customer base and our service capabilities. For example, we have expanded our data centers to 30 cities and towns outside of Japan, including purchasing a business in Hong Kong. Going forward, we will expand our premium data centers, which satisfy the high standards we set for facility, line and operations, from major cities in Asia to those in the US and Europe.
Also, we will reinforce our ability to respond globally to the expanding needs of our customers through collaboration with System Integration (SI) businesses, such as Revere, itelligence and Cirquent, which we purchased in Europe.