NTT America Division Eying Larger Master Agents

By Josh Long

A division of NTT America is seeking to develop relationships with larger master agencies in the U.S. that aim to offer IP services globally.

“We are looking at establishing relationships with a few of the largest national masters,” said Brent Duncan, vice president, sales and marketing, NTT Communications Global IP Network, NTT America. “The masters we have now are a little bit smaller in scale. I think we want to try to move up market, establish some relationships with some of the largest masters in the United States.”

NTT Communications Global IP Network, Duncan told Channel Partners, serves three core customers: “Internet-centric businesses” ranging from data centers to web-based retailers to companies such as Amazon; ISPs; and enterprises.

During an interview last week at the Fall 2012 Channel Partners Conference & Expo in Orlando, Fla., Duncan said NTT America’s goal to partner with larger master agents is based on some recent developments.

“These masters [are] trying to provide services internationally, a much larger global reach for their directs,” he said. “So we think it’s an interesting … inflexion point for our business to capitalize on the international growth that is going on right now.”

“I think it’s a priority for [masters] to deliver larger global reach to a set of their directs,” Duncan added.

Duncan said more and more Internet-centric businesses have stopped serving international customers from the United States; rather, they are beginning to push content closer to the edge of the network in overseas locations such as Asia and Europe, where that content is hosted. Traditionally, only the largest customers like Amazon were taking the content overseas, he said.

“We are seeing smaller Internet-centric businesses follow suit,” Duncan said.

Duncan said the channel represents an opportunity for NTT America to serve the enterprise space and specific vertical markets such as the financial sector.

“If we have partners that are focused on a certain geography, a lot of times the deals are happening because of local relationships that are a little tougher for us to facilitate based on our reach of our sales team,” he said, citing as a hypothetical a relationship between a telecom agent and a Wall Street trader, which might lead to NTT America providing an IP connection between New York and London.

Reseller Program Coming in Q4

NTT Communications Global IP Network also is launching a reseller program in the fourth quarter of 2012. The program will allow reseller partners to deliver NTT services — including IP, managed router, CDN (content delivery network) and DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) security products — to customers under their own brands and platforms.

“The contracts are actually owned by our resellers,” Duncan explained. “That is something we haven’t done in the past and we are going to be rolling out this year.”

NTT America is in talks with four IP services resellers and wants to keep the program small.

“We recognize when we bring on a reseller, even though they are private-labeling our product, they end up being an extension of our organization,” Duncan said, adding that NTT America limits the program to a select number of partners who have the infrastructure to effectively serve customers. “[If] someone’s buying NTT [America] bandwidth and they’re not having a good customer experience, that ultimately can reflect poorly on us.”