NTT, Cisco Partner on IoT as a Service for Sustainability Projects

NTT and Cisco Systems are partnering to promote IoT (Internet of Things) as a service capabilities that help customers meet their sustainability goals.

Key capabilities will include predictive maintenance, asset tracking, Low Power Wide Area Networking (LoRaWAN) and supply chain management services, the two companies said.

NTT and Cisco Systems: Sustainable Technology Milestones

NTT has empowered roughly 1,000 of its employees to tackle more than 100 use cases in such areas as connected cars, fleet management, predictive maintenance, smart cities, digital twins, connected factories, utilities and more, the firm said.

NTT has aggressively introduced multiple ESG and sustainability-focused initiatives. Key moves incoude:

• April 2023: NTT, NTT Anode Energy, NEC and NEC Platforms partnered on multiple fronts to promote the decarbonation of society. The effort reinforces how some IT companies and energy companies are connecting the dots between information technology and sustainability.
• January 2023: NTT DATA, e-Magic and Microsoft partnered to launch a sustainability application that leverages Microsoft Azure Digital Twins technology.

Cisco Systems, meanwhile, is one of the most active enterprise IT technology providers on the sustainability front. Key moves include:

• Launching Carbon Emissions Insights in Webex Control Hub. 
• Launching an Environmental Sustainability Specialization for partners.
• Offering the Takeback and Reuse Program.
• Rolling out and activating Circular Design Principals for all new Cisco products by 2025.

Cisco's ESG reporting hub is here. And the company's corporate social responsibility report is here.

NTT-Cisco Partnership: Executive Perspectives

In a prepared statement about the NTT-Cisco partnership, NTT Senior VP Devin Yaung said: “We are accelerating our IoT business initiatives to deliver a powerful portfolio of repeatable services that can be tailored to meet customer demand for these kinds of solutions. We’re in a unique position. We’re doubling down on NTT’s IoT capabilities to meet customer demand. What we’re doing is pulling together our collective knowledge and skillsets, and putting the full power of NTT behind it, to better service our customers and the increasing need to outfit or retrofit their organizations with the connectivity and visibility they need to improve day-to-day business operations.”

Concluded Samuel Pasquier, VP of product management, Industrial IoT Networking, Cisco: “We are excited to work together to help transition our customers to this IoT-as-a-Service model so they can quickly realize the business benefits across industries and around the globe."

Cisco Earnings Call: Sustainability and Networking R&D

The partnership surfaced one day after Cisco announced Q3 fiscal year 2023 results on May 17, 2023. During an associated earnings call, CEO Chuck Robbins described how new networking equipment will drive down power and space consumption.

In one example, Robbins stated: "In March, we introduced 800-gig capability to our Cisco 8000 platform with the industry's first 28.8 Terabit Line Card powered by Cisco's Silicon One ASICs and Pluggable Optics. This new platform can deliver up to 68% power savings and 83% space savings compared to 400-gig solutions, helping to reduce operational costs and carbon emissions as well as enabling the densification of networks to support use cases such as AI/ML and IoT. This continues to drive positive customer feedback and we are excited about this opportunity."

For the quarter, Cisco's revenue was $14.6 billion, up 14% year over year, the networking company said.