佐々木社長（President Sasaki）

NTT DATA held “NTT DATA PR Day” on Friday the 26th of last month. The PR Day, which was held for the first time, was held as an opportunity for dialogue between President Yutaka Sasaki and members of the press. The company plans to continue holding regular meetings in the future.

President Sasaki explained the growth strategy for the domestic business.
Regarding the current situation, he mentioned that the position of IT systems in society is changing. In the past, IT systems were delivered individually, but with the advent of smartphones, IT has come to play a role as a point of contact with consumers, and is increasingly taking on the design philosophy of entire social systems.
“Increasingly, we are proposing and implementing projects ranging from smartphone design to process reforms at customer contact points. For this reason, we are encouraging people within the company to ”Become producers of social change”.
　　
For future growth, they will focus on the process of “recommendation, implementation, and results.” As part of this effort, the company plans to strengthen its world-class system construction and operation capabilities.
”We aim to have the world’s strongest system construction and operation capabilities.Japan is a country with extremely high quality requirements, and the fact that we are building and operating such a system means that we are probably the world’s strongest SE group. I’m confident that we’re doing well.At the same time, new technologies such as new architectures, low-code, and agile are coming out all the time, so we’ll be fully responsive to those technologies as well” (President Sasaki).

As an example, he cited MEJAR, a shared usage system for regional financial institutions that began operations on January 4th.
”MEJAR was an important initiative for me personally, as it launched our company’s first open platform accounting system,” says President Sasaki.
MEJAR is a project that allows systems built on mainframes to be placed on new platforms without major changes to the source code. This is the first time in Japan that a shared use system has been operated as an open system.
”With many players withdrawing from the mainframe business, we need to continue to carry out initiatives like this in Japan, and we see this as an important project that will lead the way.” (President Sasaki)

NTT DATA is also promoting an integrated banking cloud concept for its core banking system. An integrated banking cloud is an effort to standardize IaaS and utilize virtualization technology to host many shared systems on the same data center and platform.
Negotiations are underway with each bank in preparation for updating the regional bank joint center’s accounting system, which is scheduled for around 2028.
MEJAR is currently available on its own platform, but the company aims to further expand its scope of application by including it on the integrated banking cloud.
”Its features are safe, secure, and inexpensive. By using a high-quality and highly secure domestic cloud, we will also ensure economic security,” notes President Sasaki.