Two new R&D laboratories in Singapore and Indonesia will help drive innovation and growth for NTT Data in the Asia Pacific region, according to Tsuyoshi Kitani, senior vice president of R&D Headquarters, NTT Data.
According to the company, Singapore is seen as a key R&D location for the region and the two new laboratories are the company’s first outside of Japan. Plans are also in place to ramp up the current number of employees to with a rapid hiring process to an eventual total of 40 people across both laboratories by 2017.
Although the NTT group has a data center and is part of an undersea cable consortium within Malaysia, Singapore was chosen as a location for an R&D laboratory due to the country’s strength in the protection of Intellectual Property (IP), the support offered by Singapore Government bodies like the Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) and Economic Development Board (EDB) as well as the ease of implementing solutions trials in Singapore, Kitani explained.
“We welcome NTT Data’s Innovation Laboratory in Singapore and are pleased that NTT Data is expanding into new areas such as applied analytics in public sector, manufacturing, healthcare and financial services”, said Kiren Kumar, Director, Infocomms & Media, Singapore Economic Development Board.
These laboratories will drive pilot projects for technologies like cloud, big data and analytics, with applications in industry verticals such as manufacturing, healthcare, financial services and smart cities solutions. To further spur development, they will also work closely with Institutes of Higher Learning (IHLs) like the Institut Teknologi Bandung to develop such solutions, NTT Data added.
Although they are newly established, the laboratories are already working on two projects for the company Kitani said. The first was an automotive telematics solution and the second a micro- finance solution for developing markets.