NTT buys Dimension Data; NSN eyeing Motorola, report suggests

Japanese carrier NTT on Thursday made a £2.1bn offer for all of South Africa-based global IT services firm Dimension Data.

The move was unanimously approved by the Dimension Data board and will create an international powerhouse catering to the corporate and enterprise services space worldwide, with particular strengths in Asia, Europe, the US, Africa, the Middle East and Australia.

NTT and Dimension said that the ICT industry is about to “enter a time of revolutionary change with the advent of cloud computing,” where enterprises are attempting to integrate business domains beyond their existing framework.

“NTT’s network carrier capabilities and assets coupled with Dimension Data’s global system integrator expertise create an incredibly powerful and unprecedented combination of capabilities and skills. The combined companies will hold a strong competitive position serving global corporations’ moving to managed infrastructure services and cloud computing,” said Jeremy Ord, executive chairman of Dimension Data.

In other M&A news, Nokia Siemens Networks is believed to be mulling a bid for Motorola’s networks business. The number being bandied around in the press is between $1.1bn and $1.3bn, after Motorola split into a networks and infrastructure and a handsets and set top box division.

But it’s not clear whether the two would make a good marriage. CDMA has a finite lifespan, and NSN’s not really interested in WiMAX. The company did lose out of Nortel’s CDMA and LTE assets but the fact that it didn’t bid big bucks against Ericsson suggests that it wasn’t that desperate for them. So really the only thing Motorola’s got that NSN might want is a foothold in North America. But whether that foothold is worth more than $1bn remains to be seen.