Meet the CRN MVPs: NTT Communications

Although its parent is a giant Japanese telco, Australia’s NTT Communications ICT Solutions is a services-focused operation built up by several acquisitions in the past few years.

NTT Coms ICT Solutions national sales director and general manager infrastructure, Julie Barbieri, says accreditations are important because from the customer's’ point of view, the channel is “an extension of a vendor”.

“Accreditations and certifications require a level of investment and focus from an IT provider,” she says. “Clients get the surety that the supplier is providing a quality service and risk is minimised.”

Outside of the MVP-eligible suppliers Citrix, VMware, Microsoft and HP, Barbieri said that Oracle is a strategic partner that’s had a long-standing relationship with NTT – going back to the Sun Microsystems era.

“We consider strategic vendors to be those who partner with us on multiple levels: joint business development, joint product development and close sales engagement. Ideally, there would be a good balance between us needing them and them needing us.”

MVP vendor partnerships

Citrix Solution Advisor Gold
HP Platinum/Gold
Microsoft Gold
VMware Premier

Notes on methodology

The CRN MVP program recognises Australia's top IT providers by measuring their value and versatility based on third-party vendor accreditations across 12 eligible vendors: Amazon Web Services, Cisco, Citrix Systems, Dell, EMC, HP (incl Aruba), IBM, Intel (incl McAfee), Lenovo, Microsoft, Symantec and VMware.

Only eligible vendors listed above. Only Gold-equivalent partner levels are included. CRN MVP companies may have accreditations with other, ineligible vendor programs or lower-level accreditations with eligible vendors (for example, we do not list silver accreditations).

We expect the list of eligible vendors to change in coming years, which may open up the CRN MVP program to new entrants.

For further information on the CRN MVP program, see this article.

We are currently accepting expressions of interest for the 2016 CRN MVPs at www.techpartner.news/MVP. Entries will open in coming months.