Forty years after the company’s founding, the storied South African IT brand Dimension Data will cease to exist from next year.

That’s because Dimension Data will become NTT Data with effect from 1 April 2024, reflecting its ownership by the giant Japanese ICT conglomerate NTT Group, CEO Alan Turnley-Jones, who will continue to lead the business in Africa and the Middle East, told TechCentral in an exclusive interview on Friday.

The name change comes with NTT’s decision to merge NTT Ltd and NTT Data to form a new global IT service provider called simply NTT Data. The new company will be headed by Abhijit Dubey, current CEO of NTT Ltd.

Dimension Data has already begun the rebranding exercise, which will take some time to complete given the complexities involved. In the coming weeks and months, Dimension Data and other branding will be taken down from its offices – including at its iconic head office at The Campus in Bryanston, Johannesburg – and be replaced with NTT Data’s branding.

Dimension Data, which was once listed on both the JSE and the London Stock Exchange and which was once one of South Africa’s most valuable listed companies, was acquired by NTT in 2010 in a R24.4-billion all-cash deal.

In 2019, NTT launched NTT Ltd following the merger of NTT Communications, Dimension Data and NTT Security into a new, US11-billion business at the time.

The combined NTT Ltd and NTT Data business will be an $18-billion-revenue IT services company and the fifth largest in this category worldwide, Turnley-Jones said.

NTT Data

NTT Ltd was headed by former Dimension Data CEO Jason Goodall, who has since left the group and is now party to litigation brought by NTT – along with former Dimension Data executives Jeremy Ord, Steven Nathan, Bruce “Doc” Watson, Grant Bodley and Saki Missaikos – over the controversial sale of The Campus property in December 2019.

Turnley-Jones declined on Friday to comment on the litigation, saying there is no news to share and that the matter is before the court.

He did say, however, without disclosing numbers, that the business is seeing good performances in areas of the market it has targeted for growth. Cloud services, especially around Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, are among the areas doing well, he said.

Read: Where to next for Dimension Data

He said the decision to merge NTT Ltd and NTT Data and to do away with the Dimension Data brand will be good for both staff and clients.

Dimension Data employees will be exposed to global opportunities as part of a much larger organisation. There will also be more global IT work apportioned to South Africa, which NTT sees as an important hub for talent, helping create jobs in the country in the process.

Clients, meanwhile, will have access to a wider portfolio of solutions than those historically offered by Dimension Data. NTT Data operates about 80 data centres around the world, for example, including the recently launched Johannesburg 1 in Midrand, making it one of the world’s largest operators of such facilities.

“NTT Data brings a lot of vertical expertise to the table. There will be more ‘vertical’ focus. We have several pre-built offers that could fit into those verticals. It gives us an opportunity to have different conversations with clients. And overall, it’s really going to give us the full-stack capability that we can take to market, from consulting to the delivery of services.”

Despite the name change and restructuring to be more aligned with NTT, Turnley-Jones said the local business will continue to foster its own culture distinct of the parent.