Kai Grunwitz

Kai Grunwitz is currently the Country Managing Director of Germany at NTT Ltd. He is responsible for both the business and the development of go-to-market strategies in the consulting and managed security areas of NTT Security. 

In addition, he is responsible for global Consulting Governance. He has 25 years of experience in the IT industry, business management and top management positions in leading companies like NTT, Oracle and Sun Microsystems among others.

As Country Managing Director – Germany NTT Ltd., he is responsible for the Development of the NTT Security Business in EMEA, the cooperation with NTT Group Companies, Managed Security Services PreSales and Consulting Services. Prior to joining NTT Security, he was Vice President at Oracle Consulting and a Member of the Board of Oracle Germany.

At Oracle, he was responsible for the Oracle Consulting Business in Germany and Switzerland with a focus on customer projects covering the whole Oracle Solution Stack (Cloud, SaaS, ERP, HCM, PLM, Engineered Systems (Exa), Big Data, Business Analytics, SOA, Security, Webcenter and Database Solutions). Managing the full P&L and a team of 180 people in Sales and Delivery. At Oracle, he was also Vice President, Technology Consulting Northern Europe. In that role, he was responsible for the Oracle Technology Consulting business in Germany, Switzerland and Nordics with a focus on customer projects covering the whole Oracle solution stack (Engineered Systems (Exa), Big Data, BI, SOA, Security, Webcenter and Database Solutions). Managing the full P&L and a team of 200+ people in Sales and Delivery. 

Prior to that, he held the role of Director of Professional Services in Central Europe at Sun Microsystems. There, Kay Grunwitz was running the Professional Services Business (Project and Managed Services) with P&L in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Poland, Czech, Slovakia and Hungary. Responsible for the sales and delivery (180 employees and 150 partner resources) of a US$110M global services P&L across Sun’s top accounts in industries that include Telecommunication, Finance, Government, Commercial, Healthcare and Education. Likewise, he was managing Sales and Delivery with full P&L responsibility for Professional and Managed Services in Germany. With the PS team providing solutions based on Sun’s Storage, Systems and Software product lines to Sun’s customers. As Manager of the German PS Organization, he managed a 50m$+ P&L with over 120 employees and 100 partner resources.

His vision can be found in a recent interview conducted by Dinis Guarda. In that interview, he said the following about NTT, Society 5.0, intelligent business, cybercrime and his future vision. 

NTT 

“NTT Ltd. is a global technology services company. They partner with organizations around the world to shape and achieve outcomes through intelligent technology solutions. As the company states, intelligent means data-driven, connected, digital and secure. As a global ICT provider, NTT employs more than 40,000 people in a diverse and dynamic workplace that spans 57 countries, trading in 73 countries and delivering services in over 200 countries and regions. Their motto is “Together we enable the connected future.” It was known as the de facto holding company of all companies that operated under NTT outside of Japan. The major operating companies of NTT in Japan, such as NTT East, NTT West, NTT Docomo, NTT Communications (Japan), NTT Data, NTT Comware, NTT TechnoCross, NTT Electronics, NTT Advanced Technology, NTT Urban Development, basic research and development laboratories in and outside of Japan, and NTT Venture Capital are not included in NTT Ltd. The company also doesn’t include global operations (oversea subsidiaries) of NTT Docomo and NTT Data.” 

Society 5.0

“Society 5.0 can be defined as a human-centred society that balances economic advancement with the resolution of social problems by a system that highly integrates cyberspace and physical space. That means that all efforts are focused on society and not tech. Society 5.0 achieves a high degree of convergence between cyberspace (virtual space) and physical space (real space). In the past information society (Society 4.0), people would access a cloud service (databases) in cyberspace via the Internet and search for, retrieve, and analyze information or data. In Society 5.0, a huge amount of information from sensors in physical space is accumulated in cyberspace. In cyberspace, this big data is analyzed by artificial intelligence (AI), and the analysis results are fed back to humans in physical space in various forms. It is all about creating tech that makes the world a better place. Society 5.0 blends tradition with vision and it was first proposed in the 5th Science and Technology Basic Plan as a future society that Japan should aspire to. It follows the hunting society (Society 1.0), agricultural society (Society 2.0), industrial society (Society 3.0), and information society (Society 4.0). We need to think as global citizens – combine business with responsibility and ethical position. Although it started in Japan, it will be exported and adapted to the rest of the world. In that regard, Japan and Germany’s angle to achieve Society 5.0 is very different, but below the surface, they share similar mindsets and challenges. For example, Germany and Japan both have an ageing population, digitisation, engineering, robotics, automation, etc. Likewise, Europe and Japan have worked around an agreement to share values and work in a collaborative way. But technological advancement is raising some concerns, especially as people are starting to not trust technology and one area that is really problematic is automation and robotisation – about their future jobs. Other concerns include data – data protection – a tradition in Germany of ownership of data.” Cybercrime “Global costs will exceed $6 Trillion In 2021. This is a big chunk of the world economy. Intelligent Cybersecurity is one of the answers to fight that back.

One of the biggest challenges people can get away and the challenge is to detect and protect, Ramson risks and the environment around them – the criminal intentions and the simplicity to do it even if criminals are not prepared for that, Cybersecurity is an invisible threat and companies prefer to pay the ransom that to prepare their companies for the risks, Importance of backups, Better to prepare than to pay a cybersecurity ransom, Hackers when they get in they just need one hour of two, Early warning systems – requires smart detect infrastructure that put in place systems and automated systems that looks at data and algorithms that detect these risks. 

"There is a massive market for cyber-criminal.” 

Future vision 

“We will see a future tech and data-driven. Technology discussions will be about ethics and philosophy. We will have a society based on sustainability and technology. I want to build a society where my kids can live and technology will play a critical role in that. Technology and sustainability have to walk side by side. Vision – infinity loop – get information from society and the process starts and we take and provide. Singularity AI will play a role but the, if we manage it in a smart way tech, will create much more benefits than risks. Use robotics in a smart way. You can always use tech for wrong systems but overall society is behind that and we are on the right track even if it is a journey.”