Cisco and NTT Ltd. announced plans to collaborate to drive Private 5G adoption across the Automotive, Logistics, Healthcare, Retail and Public sectors.

NTT and Cisco plan to co-innovate and jointly bring to market the technology and managed services that will enable enterprise customers to deploy Private 5G successfully and achieve better business outcomes. The companies plan to accelerate edge connectivity through NTT's first-to-market, Managed Private 5G solution, combined with Intel hardware, so that Cisco and NTT customers will be able to seamlessly integrate Private 5G into their pre-existing LAN/WAN/Cloud infrastructure.

Together, the companies can rapidly enable critical Industry 4.0 capabilities such as push-to-talk ‘walkie talkie' communications, automated guided vehicles (AGVs), always connected PCs (for digital frontline workers), machine vision (e.g. predictive maintenance, PPE detection), and more.

Cisco and NTT have already begun coordination on several customer deployments. In addition, the two companies are planning to power computer vision for product quality analysis, predictive analytics for manufacturing equipment functionality and maintenance, and autonomous vehicles for moving product on the factory floor, leveraging NTT's IoT connected solutions.

"Together with NTT, we aim to help our enterprise customers accelerate digital transformation, with the power of 5G and Wi-Fi across IT and OT operations," said Masum Mir, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Provider Mobility, Cisco Networking. "Our cloud-managed private 5G offers customers seamless integration with their Enterprise network fabric along with common policy and zero trust security architecture, helping to reduce technical, financial, and operational risks associated with managing 5G networks, so they can focus on driving business agility and efficiency."

"This is a natural expansion of the cutting-edge capabilities and services NTT brings to market to help our global clients modernize their businesses. NTT and Cisco are building on our mutual commitment to build a simple to manage pure private network solution," said Shahid Ahmed, Executive Vice President, New Ventures & Innovation at NTT. "As a premier systems integrator partner to Cisco, the two companies are well positioned to deliver a secure, reliable and future-proof private 5G network for our joint enterprise customers with global footprints."

For Cisco's Private 5G, NTT will provide network infrastructure design, deployment, run operations, use case development, device sourcing, compatibility, and end-to-end testing.