NTT Communications

NTT America serves as North America’s gateway to the Asia-Pacific region, offering strong capabilities in the U.S. market. As the U.S. subsidiary of NTT Communications Corporation—the global data and IP services division of Fortune Global 500 leader Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corporation (NTT)—the company provides world-class enterprise hosting, managed network, and IP services to businesses and service providers around the globe.

Since 2004, NTT America has partnered with Genacom to deliver comprehensive web development and management solutions through nTier Managed Services and nTier Web Services. This long-standing collaboration has allowed Genacom to consistently provide reliable performance, innovative solutions, and exceptional customer support to NTT America’s diverse client base.

The partnership

NTT America needed to offer its enterprise hosting customers more than servers and bandwidth. Customers were asking for the layer above the infrastructure: someone to build the site, keep it updated, watch it around the clock and fix it when something broke. Rather than staff a web department from scratch, NTT America partnered with Genacom in 2004 and resold Genacom's nTier Managed Services and nTier Web Services under its own umbrella. Genacom effectively became NTT America's website management department.

What Genacom provided

Genacom built and led the website management practice for NTT America's client base. That meant defining the service tiers, writing the onboarding process, training NTT America's sales engineers to scope and quote web management alongside hosting, and then delivering the work: design, development, content updates, security, monitoring and support for hundreds of NTT America clients. Genacom staff joined sales calls as the technical resource, produced the statements of work and stayed accountable for delivery after the contract was signed.

How the work was run

A reseller relationship only works if the partner never has to explain a failure to its own customer. Genacom ran every NTT America account to the same standard it runs its direct clients today: a named engineer per account, documented environments, scheduled maintenance windows, proactive monitoring with escalation to on-call staff, and regular reporting that NTT America could pass straight to the customer. Over the years the relationship covered new site builds, migrations onto NTT infrastructure, application support for custom systems and ongoing management for organizations across industries.

What it proved

The NTT America partnership is the origin of the nTier standard. Working inside a Fortune Global 500 company's service catalogue forced Genacom to make website management repeatable: written scopes, predictable pricing, defined response commitments and reporting a large organization could audit. Those are the same commitments every nTier plan carries now, including the 99.9% uptime SLA, same-day response on routine requests and 24/7 emergency response. nTier Managed Support is a registered trademark of Genacom, Inc.

Services involved

nTier Managed Services, nTier Web Services, sales engineering, staff training, client onboarding, hosting migration and long-term website management for a multi-client portfolio. If you are an agency, a hosting provider or an IT department that needs a website management team behind your own offer, talk to us about a partner arrangement.

How a reseller relationship is run

Selling website management through a partner adds a layer of discipline that a direct client never sees. NTT America's sales engineers had to quote Genacom's services confidently, so Genacom wrote the scoping questions, the tiered service descriptions and the pricing rules they used, and trained them on what the answers meant technically. Every engagement then followed one path: a discovery call with the customer and the NTT account team, a written scope, onboarding onto NTT infrastructure, and a maintenance calendar the customer could see. Escalations went to an on-call Genacom engineer directly, with NTT America copied, so a hosting customer never waited for a middleman. Monthly reporting was produced in a format NTT America could forward to its own clients without editing, and quarterly reviews covered every account in the portfolio rather than only the ones with open issues.

What it means for a Genacom client today

The portfolio approach built for NTT America is why Genacom can manage more than 500 websites with consistent quality. The same documentation, monitoring, backup and release processes run on every site, which means the team that handles an emergency at two in the morning has the information it needs regardless of who built the site or when. It also means the commitments in a Genacom plan are not marketing language; they were written for a Fortune Global 500 partner that would have enforced them. Uptime, response times, security patching and reporting are measured and delivered the same way for every account, and that consistency is the product.

Questions to ask before you outsource website management

The NTT America program was designed around the questions any buyer should put to a provider. Who is accountable when the site goes down at night, and how quickly does a person respond? Where are backups stored, how often are they taken and when was a restore last tested? Which updates are applied automatically and which are tested on staging first? What does the monthly report contain, and who reads it? Genacom answers each of those in writing in every plan, with the same commitments for a single-site business as for a partner portfolio, because the process that satisfied a telecommunications carrier's due diligence is the process that keeps every managed site running today.