NTT Com buys controlling stake in Frontline Systems

Japanese carrier NTT Com has bought a 70 percent stake in Australian integrator Frontline Systems. 

One of Australia’s largest independent integrators, Frontline is a $277 million business with data centres, warehouse and sales in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Canberra and Singapore.

The deal gives NTT Com access to Frontline’s data centre subsidiary, Harbour MSP, to accelerate the development of NTT's cloud solutions in Australia.

Harbour MSPs Steam Engine cloud computing stack was also part of the deal and key to NTT Com’s plans to expand.

Frontline chief executive officer Steve Murphy said that Frontline's executive team and staff would remain after the deal is finalised. 

He said Harbour MSP's plans to build a data centre in Melbourne were on track. And he expected NTT Com’s balance sheet to see this and other projects to come on stream faster. Harbour MSP would continue to lease space in Global Switch and Equinix in Sydney expand in Sydney, Victoria and Asia.

The purchase marks a significant expansion of NTT Com’s footprint in Australia and follows its $US3.3 billion acquisition last year of Dimension Data.

NTT Com will work to mesh Frontline’s server technologies with its network integration, software development and maintenance capabilities.

“The alliance will mean that Frontline is bolstered by NTT Com’s depth of knowledge and resources in networking and communications, while we continue to extend service offerings beyond our core strengths in infrastructure and managed services,” Murphy said.

NTT Com vice president Sadao Maki said Frontline was key to the company’s ambitions to become the “ICT partner of choice” in Australia and New Zealand.

“The addition of the managed IT infrastructure professionals at Frontline and its subsidiaries is a perfect complement to our subsidiary NTT Australia’s well-established network business serving the rapidly evolving enterprise cloud market in the ANZ region,” Maki said.

Frontline was one of the biggest Oracle and Sun Microsystems resellers in Australia; Murphy said its customers would be better served under the arrangements.