CNME Editor Mark Forker sat down for an exclusive interview with Burcak Soydan, Managing Director for the Middle East at NTT DATA, to learn how the company is one of the best kept secrets in the global IT industry, and how its acquisition strategy has enabled it to become one of the world’s largest global system integrators.
In the 10 years I have spent covering the ICT landscape across the Middle East region, I have been fortunate to speak to some of the most prominent voices and brightest minds from within the industry.
There is a common theme amongst many of them, they are highly intelligent, possess strong leadership skills, and can expertly articulate and present the future vision of their respective companies.
However, every now and then you meet a tech executive whose passion for their job is tangible, and that energy, excitement and enthusiasm that they have for the job is almost infectious, and that was certainly the case when I sat down with Burcak Soydan, Managing Director for the Middle East at NTT DATA.
Soydan has enjoyed a distinguished career to date and is perhaps best known amongst his peers for this 19-year spell at US multinational technology giant IBM.
He helped grow IBM’s presence across multiple markets across the Middle East, Türkiye and Europe.
Now, it’s his job to do the same for one of Japan’s most iconic institutions in the form of NTT DATA.
He began the conversation by laying out the rich history of NTT DATA.
“I joined the company in 2023, and I’m still learning about it. I honestly believe that NTT DATA is one of the best kept secrets in the entire ICT industry. I think it’s important to provide a bit of background on the company to lay the foundations for its story. NTT stands for Nippon Telegraph and Telephone, and there are some members of my team who don’t even know what a telegraph is, so that shows you the legacy and heritage of the company. It is over 150 years-old, and NTT Docomo is the biggest telecommunications operator in Japan – and 30% of the company is owned by the Japanese government, so in many respects, it is a national treasure,” said Soydan.
According to Soydan, a huge factor in its continued success over the years has been a combination of never standing still, and strategic long-term planning.
As he explained, at the beginning of the new millennium, the company opted to go in a new direction.
Over the past two decades, NTT has expanded globally to become one of the world’s largest system integrators, originating from Asia when most major system integrators emerged from the US, Europe, or India. One of the most significant things that I have learned about working for a Japanese company, is that they always think in the long-term. A short-term plan in the Japanese business world is 3-5 years, and having previously worked for a US company, a short-term plan to them was next week, so culturally it’s very different. They build a 20-year plan, and they execute that meticulously. So, they set out 20 years ago to break into the top 5 Global System Integrators in the world, and they did that through a strategy of acquisitions,” said Soydan.
Soydan highlighted how over the years NTT DATA has acquired over 90 companies, including entities such as Dimension Data and Dell Services.
That acquisition model has yielded great benefits and has positioned the company as one of the largest full- stack global system integrators in the world.
But what is the definition of a full-stack integrator?
“The NTT leadership team had one vision from the outset and that was to become a full-stack system integrator. What that means is we have a submarine cable business, which carries a significant amount of the world’s internet traffic, and we have a datacenter business that is the 3rd largest in the world. We also have a very large technology solutions business that has on-prem infrastructure build-up capabilities, and we work with partners such as Cisco, Dell and Palo Alto Networks to name a few. We have a cloud and application business where we work with companies such as Salesforce and ServiceNow, and we also have a data and AI entity, and a satellite business. So, effectively, our journey starts from under the sea and ends up in space. We are a dirt to AI integrator, and that is what we mean when we say full-stack integrator,” said Soydan.
As aforementioned above it was the company’s acquisition strategy that has put them on such solid footing.
However, even Soydan expressed his surprise at how skilled NTT DATA are at absorbing companies that they have acquired.
“I was taken aback by this incredible integrated capability we had to acquire companies and absorb them into our overall organization. There is no other example of what NTT DATA has done. Around 3-4 years ago we started that journey to becoming one company, and in 2024 we announced our new brand that is today known as NTT DATA.” said Soydan.
Further evidence of the infancy of the NTT DATA brand is the fact that when Soydan joined the company, it was still operating as Dimension Data, despite its acquisition by NTT in 2016.
“When I first joined the company here in the Middle East, I joined Dimension Data. The responsibility I was tasked with was to rebrand the company here in the Middle East to NTT DATA, which doesn’t just mean changing the sign. It means expanding the portfolio and transforming it into a global company. We changed the leadership team and appointed people who could speak the global language of the company, but also intrinsically understood the local market here across the Gulf. Again, as I have already stated, I was genuinely amazed at how much internal capability there was in terms of integrating companies, and the whole M&A process is so seamless. There is an entire team that is dedicated to identifying companies that we feel are the right fit for us and are aligned with our strategy,” said Soydan.
Soydan highlighted the fact that they are a global full stack integrator, doesn’t mean that translates into every individual market where they have a presence.
“Full stack doesn’t exist in every country and region, so a key responsibility in my remit was to build up all our capabilities in the Middle East. When I first joined, we probably had around 20-25% of our global portfolio in the region, which is primarily focused on system integration and that business is doing very, very well, particularly in Saudi Arabia. However, we didn’t have the other 80%, so we had to sit down and devise a strategy to try and build up that 80% here in the Middle East region,” said Soydan.
Soydan said that the other 80% essentially consisted of a mixture of cloud, applications and data, and outlined the approach they adopted to close that percentage gap.
“We quickly figured out that to get that other 80% then we needed to adopt a two-fold approach. We can build a lot of these capabilities organically, because we have the tools to expand, and we can shift resources, and we are already doing that in some projects in Saudi Arabia. However, we knew that there were some areas where we should look at an acquisition in a bid to help us accelerate, and for us that area was the cloud,” said Soydan.
Soydan expressed their fears of missing out on the next wave of cloud innovation and opportunity emerging across the region, but specifically in Saudi Arabia.
“I think it has become quite evident that there is a second phase of cloud expansion coming to the region right now. I think the first phase was more UAE-orientated, but I think the second phase is going to be more Saudi-orientated, and that has been further heightened by the fact that Microsoft and AWS will have their datacenters operational in the KSA by the end of 2026. We believe that will trigger a second boom, and we don’t want to miss out on that,” said Soydan.
The Managing Director at NTT DATA also highlighted the invalidity of references from the US and Europe, saying customers across the Middle East want to know what NTT DATA has done in this region.
According to Soydan, another key component in its success is the decision-making processes in place at NTT DATA, which he described as unique.
“We are a very localized global company, and what I mean when I say that is we have a lot of local decision-making, which came as a surprise to me when I first joined the company. I worked for a large global company prior to joining NTT DATA, and the decision-making within that entity was very centralized. I’m not saying one approach is necessarily better than the other, but choice is important and I do love the fact that we have that localization,” said Soydan.
Soydan has made no secret of the fact that they needed to build their cloud capability across the region, and their decision to acquire Zero&One is going to help them do that.
When pressed on the science behind the selection process of what company to acquire, Soydan stressed the importance of ‘culture.
“When our M&A team carry out their due diligence on a company that we want to acquire, they also look at the cultural fit of that company. A lot of acquisitions fail if the cultural fit is not there, because it can create in-fighting and you can lose a lot of resources. Zero&One is the premier AWS partner for the Middle East and North Africa, and they describe themselves as builders. The owners are real techies, which we love, and they see AWS as their Lego set. They don’t say that they are a cloud company, they say they are a solutions company that can build what you want, and they use cloud as an enabler, and that’s exactly the way we would define ourselves. We have never described ourselves as a consulting company. We always say that we give just enough consulting because we want to build and execute things, and we don’t want to over-consult companies. In summary, they were the right cultural fit for us,” said Soydan.
Soydan added that Zero&One had reached a very good size but had reached a point where they needed some support to get to the next level.
“We are going to be doing a full integration with them, and they will act as our cloud practice in the Middle East that is linked in tandem with our global team. They will be able to leverage our global capabilities, and their go-to-market team will be fully integrated with our global team,” said Soydan.
Soydan said that the acquisition of Zero&One was also serving as an enabler for the other things that they want to do.
“What we discovered during our due diligence of Zero&One was the fact that they had AI applications in production. So, naturally the conversation pivoted from cloud computing to data and AI and cloud-native applications, because we know that a large amount of AI will live on the cloud. It now gives us a lot of capability in terms of references in the region and doing agentic AI on the cloud, and that allows us to really ramp up the full stack that we want to deliver across the Middle East region,” said Soydan.
The conversation then shifted to the most talked about subject in technology, yes, you guessed it, AI.
Despite the hype, AI failure rates remain high, with only 1 out of 4 pilots globally getting to the production phase.
Soydan acknowledged that many CIOs are under pressure to yield results from AI deployments, but he believes the real challenge is the demand to scale AI.
“I was at the Future Investment Initiative in Riyadh with our Global CEO, and we had several conversations with a series of ministries from across the KSA, and when we asked them what their priorities were they said: No.1 was AI, No.2 was AI and No.3 was AI. So, it is evidently clear AI is the priority and there is a rush to deliver outcomes with AI. However, what we see is the challenge to scale AI, and in the enterprise world that is what you need. But it is not easy as there are a lot of challenges in relation to both infrastructure and security,” said Soydan.
Soydan also added that when it comes to AI, NTT DATA is placing a huge emphasis on the enterprise sovereign AI space.
“We are very focused on enterprise sovereign AI, and we are partnering with companies that are also investing their time and resources into enterprise AI. We see ourselves as a real enabler of enterprise AI. We also think that enterprise AI is going to be different, and there will be different players operating in that space. In that domain you need more responsible, secure, integrated and cost-efficient AI, you don’t need a full LLM for a lot of business tasks, instead you need specialized models. The models need to be customized to your business needs, and that takes time because the models need to be retrained,” said Soydan.
Soydan described their partnership with Mistral AI as fantastic – and said they are both on the same page when it comes to enterprise AI and referenced a sovereign AI project that they are both working on together in Luxembourg.
Soydan concluded a brilliantly engaging and informative exchange by lamenting the issue of skills when it comes to AI.
“The talent and skills shortage are major issues. Quite simply, there are not enough people that can retrain the models to give businesses the customization they need, and it’s a global challenge, it’s not at a local or regional level. The AI skills gap is a global concern. If you want to scale across the enterprise you need different skill sets, so it is a problem and one that isn’t going to be resolved overnight,” said Soydan.
