NTT Acquires Cloud Consultant Centerstance

Less than two months after announcing its acquisition agreement, telecommunications giant NTT (News - Alert) has finalized its acquisition of software and cloud consulting firm, Centerstance.

NTT, a $130-billion company based in Japan, ranks 29th on Fortune’s Global 500 list. The newly acquired company has been renamed NTT Centerstance, Inc. and will remain a wholly-owned subsidiary of NTT, company officials said.

Centerstance, one of just a few Salesforce.com (News - Alert) Platinum partners in the U.S., specializes in helping companies identify and move key business processes to the cloud leveraging the Salesforce.com platform. Centerstance, based in Portland, Ore., has completed over 2,000 deployments since its inception in 2001.

Last year, Centerstance’s sales reached $12.8 million, growing by another 57 percent so far this year.

The acquisition solidifies NTT’s cloud-based business solutions portfolio, and accelerates the company’s strategy to offer services across the cloud computing landscape, from strategy to implementation and management – according to Nick Yarymovych, senior vice president of global consulting and operations at NTT.

“This business combination positions us to extend our reach to emerging markets, globally scale our high impact consulting team, while maintaining our optimized methodology and focus on solving customer business process challenges with cloud technologies,” Yarymovych said in a statement. “Recent conversations with our customers and partners over the last weeks indicate they are thrilled about the combined company and welcome the enhanced value.”

Since NTT’s CEO Hiroo Unoura took the helm in June, the company has increased its level of investment in cloud-related services through group companies Dimension Data (News - Alert), NTT Communications and NTT DATA to provide clients with a variety of cloud service and delivery models.

In September, Centerstance entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by NTT, one of the world’s largest global IT and telecommunications service providers.

“We are thrilled to become part of the NTT family,” Arne Kainu, managing partner of Centerstance, said following the announcement. “We believe the NTT and Centerstance combination will fuel our ability to execute our growth strategy toward global expansion and bring new integration capability to our customers in all corners of the world, while still providing an exceptionally high level of service to our customers.”