NTT Security Taps New Americas Chief

Fresh off news last month that NTT would be consolidating its businesses, NTT Security said it named its global chief information security officer as its new CEO for the Americas.

John Petrie told CRN in his first-ever interview as CEO that the priority moving forward is to demonstrate to customers the range of capabilities that NTT Security will have as part of the new NTT Inc. Under the new organization, Petrie will operate what he calls a “center of excellence – for the new global company” focused on security across multiple verticals, including MSS, consulting, strategic advising, GRC, and the life cycle of security services across the board.

“I think one of the things I think we need to emphasize is about NTT consolidating its focus,” he said.

“We’re going to be a force in the marketplace as it relates to security, but across the ICT spectrum. We are consolidating resources,” he said. “We are going to integrate all of our capabilities into a single entity. And I think its going to be powerful. We are going to be the 500-pound gorilla in the landscape. Its coming.”

In his new role, Petrie replaces Khiro Mishra, who is now NTT’s global chief security architect officer. Petrie said he is up to the challenge.

“Today, I think a lot of our clients in the U.S. are still thinking of us as a regional company that transitioned into NTT Security,” he said. “So we’ve got to change that outlook, and we’ve got to move very quickly about how we position that.”

NTT Security says that it has defended against 150 million attacks. It also has 10,000 clients, and monitors 165,000 devices. Petrie, who worked as NTT Security’s global CISO for nearly two years before his CEO appointment, said he wants to grow the operation outside of the U.S. even further.

“We haven’t even tapped in to the overall global market, in my view,” he said “An expansion into Central and South America is key for us moving forward. We have some presence down there, but we need to do more down there. We need to expand that. We need to solidify our operations. Because of the different language structure that we may run into, Spanish and Portuguese, primarily, we’ll have to rely on some of our European counterparts to help us prepare for that, but the expansion into Central America, and South America, is a key growth area for us.”

NTT Security monitors 40 percent of the global internet traffic, he said. That gives the company unmatched capabilities in threat detection and incident response, he said. In order to sell those capabilities, NTT is going to commit to meet customers where they are as their “trusted advisor” and become agnostic when it comes to platforms.

“We’re increasing our capabilities to managed security mechanisms within data lakes,” he said. “We’re looking at being able to have a better speed to market with clients as it relates to response. We’re alighting our activities to be able to monitor through multiple platforms. We‘re going to become agnostic in a lot of areas so that we can meet our client demands. If they’ve already made an investment into a particular technology. We’re going to make our services available to participate monitor and manage those technologies.”

In doing so, NTT Security is looking at taking share from the best in the businesses when it comes to managed security and technology consulting.

“I think my focus is going to be, and again, not thinking about it strategically, I’d take a look at the MQ in MSS and MQ in consultant and take target at the upper right quadrant,” he said. “That’s who we’d be looking at directly.”

NTT Security was formed in August 2016 from capabilities of NTT’s other businesses, NTT Com Security, Solutionary, Dimension Data, NTT Innovation Institute and NTT Communications.