NTT R&D Forum 2024: A Showcase of Innovation Aimed at Creating a Better Future
NTT is a top 15 global tech company with nearly $100B in revenue and 340K employees worldwide. What many people don’t realize is they’re much more than a telecom provider – they’re also a major player in enterprise IT services, data centers, and even renewable energy. Six Five Media is with Will Townsend, Vice President & Principal Analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, as he sits down with with Vito Mabrucco, Global Chief Marketing Officer at NTT to digest the 2024 NTT R&D Forum held in Tokyo, Japan—a premier event that brings together top tier people, technologies, and research, fostering a sustainable society through innovation.
Tune in to hear about 👇
- Highlights from the NTT R&D Forum, emphasizing its role in uniting technology and research for sustainability
- Insights into IOWN, a photonics based network and computing infrastructure
- An exploration of how the IOWN initiative is being implemented and its expected impact on networking, computing and AI, illustrating NTT’s commitment to innovation and sustainability
- How their tech can handle data-intensive applications like AI, especially where power consumption and efficiency are major concerns
- The strategic vision behind the R&D Forum and the IOWN initiative, highlighting NTT’s pursuit of building a sustainable future through technological advancement
- Other R&D projects in the works, including: optical cryptographic circuits and non-invasive health monitoring technologies
Learn more at NTT and the R&D Forum Website.
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Transcript
Will Townsend: Welcome to another Six Five Media virtual podcast. I’m Will Townsend, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, I cover networking and security. And joining me today is Vito Mabrucco. He’s the Global Chief Marketing Officer for NTT Corporation. Vito, welcome to the podcast.
Vito Mabrucco: Thank you, Will. Great to see you again.
Will Townsend: Yeah, it’s been a while. So we saw each other in Tokyo last year. We’re going to get into that in a moment, but I’d like to start first with NTT.
Vito Mabrucco: Sure.
Will Townsend: It’s a company that’s very well known, obviously in Japan and Asia, but not as many folks know what the company is all about in the United States. So I thought we could start with you providing an overview of what NTT is focused on.
Vito Mabrucco: Sure, no problem. I appreciate the opportunity here, Will, to have this discussion. So NTT is actually quite a large global technology company that not a lot of people are aware of, but we’re probably in the top 10 or 15 largest technology companies in the world. We’re almost a hundred billion in revenue depending on exchange rates, with 340,000 employees and almost half of those are external to our headquarter country of Japan, and we deliver services to 190 countries. Now, what people don’t realize is we have multiple lines of business all related to technology. The first and largest one is our mobile operator business, where we’re serving 90 million customers, including providing not just mobility services but value add services around finance and entertainment and payments.
And then we also have our Enterprise IT services business, which is NTT Data. Our mobile operator is called NTT DOCOMO, and our IT services is NTT Data. They deliver consulting, networking, data center managed services to Fortune 500 type companies. We also have a local and SMB business delivering technology and services to local enterprises and local small businesses, including fiber to the home. And then we have a number of other businesses that make up almost 10% or 10 billion of our revenue in things like renewable energy, real estate development, even we have a joint venture with a company called Space Compass where we’re delivering communication services from space. So it’s quite a big and diversified global technology company.
Will Townsend: It really is. And I’ve gotten to know you and the team over the last couple of years and like many companies, you use signature events to really generate awareness for what you’re doing. Upgrade occurs in San Francisco, and I’m looking forward to attending Upgrade again this year. But I want to talk about The R&D Forum and the last two years I’ve been able to attend in Tokyo and it is a comprehensive event that highlights all the things that NTT is focused on. So I thought it might be helpful for our viewers and listeners to hear from you about what the overall mission is for The R&D Forum.
Vito Mabrucco: Yeah, so R&D is a very big part of our culture and commitment. It represents about 30% of our profits, and we’ve been investing in primary research for decades and decades at that level. And it’s really part of our DNA from the very beginning. We’re a 150-year-old company whose main focus was to deliver innovation and technology to the public. Now of course, we’re a for-profit business, but we still believe very much in delivering not just for today, but for the long term. So The R&D Forum and The Upgrade Event, they’re really are way of showcasing and delivering that message of R&D to thousands of people, including customers and the community and the media. And it’s really intended to show that we’re working on primary research, which is things that don’t become real for like five or ten, fifteen years, but we’re also developing those into commercial opportunities and businesses for ourselves and for our partners and customers.
So The R&D Forum is an annual event. It’s a major event that we hold. There’s over 90, 95 exhibits approaching 100 exhibits. And what’s unique about it is when you attend this, and you saw this, you’re actually speaking directly with the researchers. This isn’t a sales and marketing, just an empty shell. This is the real people showing you the real R&D that we’re doing. And I think that’s why people keep coming back every year to really get that feel of what is going on, what’s new and what are you guys working on because we’re giving you a preview of the future. So we’re very proud of this event and The Upgrade Event is really taking that, bringing it to North America so that even more people are exposed to all these great innovations.
Will Townsend: Yeah, no, I always leave educated, the last two years. And last year’s events theme was IOWN Integral and IOWN is your all optical, all photonic network architecture that in my mind has great promise. When you look at the challenges that modern AI applications like Agentic and generative AI present, it’s super impressive given the latency and throughput that can be supported there. So I’d love to start with just your overall impressions of what occurred last year with respect to IOWN, because you and I have talked about this, it’s a multi-year journey to get there.
Vito Mabrucco: Yeah, Yeah. IOWN really where we’re putting and have all of our strength and capabilities because it comes from the world of fiber optics. And we’ve been in the world of fiber optics for decades and decades. And in 2019, we invented and patented the first photonic transistor. Now, what that meant was that we began to think about networks and computing of the future and what needs to change in order to deal with, even before AI became the hot topic, we knew there was going to be an increasing demand on the infrastructure. And so by creating this ability to transition from electronic signals to photonic signals, we were able to deliver the benefits that you mentioned, which is higher speed, much lower latency, like 200 times lower latency, and at a very sustainable power efficient manner. So these capabilities are now becoming more well-known and more perhaps understood as the way to address the upcoming demands that AI is going to put on our power usage, but not only the power usage, but the ability to use AI in a way that is really going to take it to the next level where you do need very low latency like approaching the speed of light latency. And we’ve been able to do that and have a roadmap to deliver on photonics based networking and computing of the future.
Will Townsend: Well, photonics has existed for quite some time and it serves as the interconnect when you look at pluggables and that sort of thing. But what I find fascinating about NTT’s approach is that you want to embed and your vision is to embed photonics even in the device itself, and so that eliminates the bottleneck from my perspective. So the impact on networking is tremendous. Are there any other details that you can share? I know that you’ve put together an ecosystem that’s really driving this and it’s a who’s who of technology companies, and maybe you could spend some time there.
Vito Mabrucco: Yeah, I mean, that’s called The IOWN Global Forum. And before we touch on that because that’s a key component to any successful technology which needs global standards and collaboration. But the thing that we want to emphasize with photonics is that while we are a network company in origin, we’re actually a technology company today that is delivering value as, for example, the third-largest data center provider in the world and also one of the top five IT services companies in the world. So the IOWN goal and roadmap includes, like you said, both the networking but also the data center where all the talk is these days about what’s going to happen to the data center. And we have a four phase approach for IOWN. The first one we’ve delivered on, which is the all photonics network. And that allows us to connect end-to-end using photonics. And really it takes away all the lags and the jitters and the slowness of the existing internet infrastructure and allows point-to-point photonics-based networking.
Now, what that does is it changes the model around, for example, disaster recovery or robotics control. And in fact, one example of how we’ve proven how important this is is we were able to connect both Taiwan and Japan through a 3000 kilometer connection, and we got the latency down to 17 milliseconds, which is approaching the speed of light. And what that means is, for example, financial services, now you have an ability to recover almost at the speed of light using an IOWN-based backbone. But where this really starts to impact is in the data center. And so IOWN 2 is where we’re connecting boards within computers in a data center. And if you think of networking, it’s really just moving data. And now by moving data with photonics instead of electronics, again, you achieve that same capability that I just talked about in the network, but now in the computer. And by doing a board-to-board, you take out heat, you increase speed, and the next step is to do it from what we call chip-to-chip or XPU or CPU, GPU to GPU.
And then the fourth phase, it’s going to be actually within the chip. So all of these combined really bring the photonics and fiber optics that we all knew to a new level. And we are doing this in partnership with the industry. So we decided early on that we would, and we believe that it’s more important that we have a global collaborative standards approach, which will increase the pie for everyone. And yes, we may have a smaller piece of that, but it’ll be a bigger pie for all of us. And without that kind of collaboration, it won’t work. Now who are we talking about? You said 150, Microsoft, Google, Cisco, Ericsson, Nokia.
Will Townsend: Dell Technologies.
Vito Mabrucco: Yeah, all the big names are there.
Will Townsend: Yeah. And it’s a heavy lift. I mean, the vision is, it’s audacious, right? But it takes a village to use that terminology. And the company continues to focus in other areas as well of practical research. NTT Research based in Sunnyvale is doing some amazing things with digital twin cardiovascular systems and that sort of thing. So I was hoping that you could share with our audience some of the additional practical research that’s going on beyond what you’re doing with DOCOMO and mobile networks and in the photonics networking with IOWN.
Vito Mabrucco: Yeah, I mean, we’ve always been a big believer in R&D that contributes back to society and back to the well-being of people and health and healthcare is a very important one. And you mentioned the bio-digital twin and the bio-digital heart, the folks in Sunnyvale are working on. There’s also a significant amount of investment in R&D in the Tokyo labs, for example, non-invasive glucose sensor for measuring blood sugar. That would be an amazing revolution for those who are dealing with that issue and a major breakthrough. Also, for example, body sensors for people who are paralyzed or suffer from ALS, that’s another way of delivering on health. But we think of it even bigger than that. For example, agriculture is a very challenging area these days that is not getting a lot of attention from a technology point of view. So we’re developing new crop breeding technologies and more ways to address health and well-being in the agricultural world.
The one that really got my attention was also this area. I don’t know if you saw it while you were there, it was an optical cryptographic circuit. And we’re challenged, as you know, with cybersecurity these days, and again, the folks in Silicon Valley are working on that, but this optical cryptographic circuit is already fairly small. You needed a microscope to see it. But we are looking at how we can continue to miniaturize that to take it all the way down to the cell phone and to the personal device, because we’re going to be challenged with cybersecurity, especially with quantum computing coming. So we really look at the whole, I guess, spectrum of how we invest in technologies that matter for people today and in the future.
Will Townsend: I’m glad you touched on security, Vito, because it’s an important aspect of networking, securing AI models. And I do recall spending time with the team and learning more about what you’re doing with that piece of Silicon. I’ve written about root of trust and secure enclaves and leveraging Silicon is just another way to provide an extra layer of security beyond the various point solutions that exist today, and it’s impressive what NTT is doing from a research perspective in that regard. But as we wrap our conversation, I want to touch a little bit on sustainability, something that you mentioned earlier during our conversations, and I think one of the big concerns around today’s IT infrastructure is power consumption. And certainly I think generative AI has put this at the forefront. There are lots of concerns around Silicon that runs at very high power envelopes. And so I’m wondering if you can spend a little bit of time talking about how IOWN and The R&D Forum and an Upgrade all come together to address this issue and this concern around sustainable IT infrastructure.
Vito Mabrucco: Yes. Sustainability to us has been, again, 150-year-old company from day one. And I know that everyone talks about it now, it’s something that we should all care about. But for us, we were born with sustainability in our culture and so what that means is that when we are developing future technologies, we’re always thinking about sustainability and we think of sustainability in three ways. Of course, there’s green sustainability, there’s the well-being part of sustainability, and there’s a prosperity. On the green side, to answer your question around AI, we really started to understand that current infrastructure couldn’t withstand and couldn’t stand the needs of the future. And so that’s where the invention of the photonics electronics conversion came together, where we can start to address the net-zero goals. And in order to put our money where our mouth is, we bet our own net-zero plan on three things. One is around renewable energy. So we actually have a renewable energy company that we own and built and deliver renewable energy to our own business. That covers 45% of our goal. But the second-largest component is using photonics technologies, and that covers another 45% because well, let’s face it, we’re not going to get to net-zero just recycling.
Will Townsend: No.
Vito Mabrucco: No. So we bet on photonics, and that’s where I think if we can build photonics networks, photonics computing with the industry, it’s not the only answer, let’s not fool ourselves, but it is a big part of it. And of course, circular economy is important too. That’s 10%. So that’s our net-zero methodology. But it also means well-being, as I talked about healthcare, how we can deliver more benefits to society and to communities. And the third one is prosperity. Making technology more ubiquitous, more accessible, especially AI, as AI becomes more prevalent, as you know, around the world. So we believe in those three things and we’ll continue to invest with those always in mind.
Will Townsend: I love the fact that you mentioned the company has been focused on sustainability since day one. It’s such an important aspect. A lot of companies claim tech for good because it’s in vogue right now. But I think when you look at the history of NTT and then you look at the practical research that’s going on and what you’re doing, it really puts your money where your mouth is from my perspective, and it’s quite exciting. So, well, Vito, thanks for just a very compelling conversation. I want to let our viewers and listeners know that I will be publishing a Moor Insights & Strategy research note that covers a lot of what Vito and I talked about today, as well as it’ll go deeper into some of my big takeaways from The R&D forum from last year. But with that, Vito, thanks again for your time. It’s been a great conversation.
Vito Mabrucco: Thank you, Will. Really enjoyed it. Thank you.