Cisco and NTT announced a deal to collaborate on private 5G in the automotive, logistics, healthcare, retail, and public sectors. They said they will “co-innovate”, and combine to bring to market both “technology and managed services”. Specifically, they said they would combine NTT’s managed private 5G service, which uses a core network from Celona and radio components from other partners, with hardware from Intel.

A statement said this combination, alone, will allow customers of both firms to “seamlessly integrate” private 5Gtheir pre-existing networking and cloud infrastructure. They have already “begun coordination”, they said, on a number of customer deployments. They listed a number of key Industry 4.0 applications to promote as a pair: “push-to-talk ‘walkie talkie’ communications, automated guided vehicles and always-on PCs for frontline workers.

They will also put focus on developing machine vision solutions for predictive maintenance and analytics for manufacturing equipment, detection of personal protective equipment (PPE), product quality analysis, and autonomous vehicles for moving products on factory floors.

Masum Mir, senior vice president and general manager in Cisco’s networking business, said: “We aim to help our enterprise customers accelerate digital transformation, with the power of 5G and Wi-Fi across IT and OT operations. 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.”

Shahid Ahmed, executive vice president of new ventures and innovation at NTT, said: “This is a natural expansion of the cutting-edge capabilities and services NTT brings to market… NTT and Cisco are… to build a simple-to-manage pure private network solution. 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 joint enterprise customers with global footprints.”