This episode of Over the Edge was recorded live at Edge Computing World in October 2022. It features an interview between Matt Trifiro and Rika Nakazawa, Group Vice President, Connected Industry & Sustainability for Americas at NTT. In this episode, Rika tells her story of becoming a leader in tech and how she arrived at NTT, she defines the role connected industry plays within sustainability, and provides her thoughts on the future of edge computing including private 5G, blockchain, and the metaverse.
This episode of Over the Edge was recorded live at Edge Computing World in October 2022. It features an interview between Matt Trifiro and Rika Nakazawa, Group Vice President, Connected Industry & Sustainability for Americas at NTT. Rika is a global applied innovation and sustainability senior leader advancing business where digital transformation drives the greatest value.
As a senior leader in the New Ventures & Innovations group, she’s building NTT's Connected Industry team, advancing how part of Edge as a Service delivers business transformation outcomes. Rika is a frequent conference speaker and chair, with more than 15 years of business development, partnership management, innovation, design-thinking, and strategy deployment experience. She was featured on the CRN "Women Power 70" List and is on the advisory board for VR/AR, AI / Machine Learning, and IoT startups, and advancing initiatives for women in technology and leadership. Rika received her Bachelor of Arts in East Asian Studies from UCLA in 1997.
In this episode, Rika tells her story of becoming a leader in tech and how she arrived at NTT, she defines the role that connected industry plays within sustainability, and provides her thoughts on the future of edge computing including private 5G, blockchain, and the metaverse. Rika also provides advice for aspiring women in tech.
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“It's not just edge in isolation, it's about the ability for you to transmit data and relevant data at the edge and to be able to enable that processing to happen in real time. And, not just from one source, but multiple sources, and to be able to synchronize that.”
“We have to think that sustainability fundamentally is about considering the causal links of the butterfly that flaps its swings on one side of the earth, creating a tidal wave on the other side. And, so there's a lot of good intentions that's happening within sustainability in the way that things are gonna be managed. But unless we use edge and collectively create a network of edge intelligence to demonstrate the impact that one action and initiative is gonna have for a group of stakeholders and where that happens downstream or upstream, then we're going to be in a worse place.”
“Diversity, equity, inclusion will in some ways take care of itself. If we can help organizations really anchor around culture, I think culture is in a crisis. And, so I think that the way that organizations thrive is through culture and the way that you can align a purpose. Purpose driven business is a big topic as well, and I think that technology can really help us really create that point of light around key areas of purpose, what people want to rally around.”
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(04:30) Becoming a woman in tech
(09:45) Arriving at NTT
(11:45) Connected industry and sustainability
(15:00) Overview of NTT
(22:45) Important objectives for digital transformation
(30:45) Sustainability as a service
(45:15) Exciting future technology
(55:45) Advice for aspiring women in tech
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Over the Edge is brought to you by Dell Technologies to unlock the potential of your infrastructure with edge solutions. From hardware and software to data and operations, across your entire multi-cloud environment, we’re here to help you simplify your edge so you can generate more value. Learn more by visiting DellTechnologies.com/SimplifyYourEdge for more information or click on the link in the show notes.
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[00:00:00] Narrator 1: Hello and welcome to Over the Edge.
This episode was recorded live at Edge Computing World in October 2022. It features an interview between Matt Trifiro and Rika Nakazawa, Group Vice President, Connected Industry & Sustainability for Americas at NTT. Rika is a global applied innovation and sustainability senior leader advancing business where digital transformation drives the greatest value.
As a senior leader in the New Ventures & Innovations group, she’s building NTT's Connected Industry team, advancing how part of Edge as a Service delivers business transformation outcomes. Rika is a frequent conference speaker and chair, with more than 15 years of business development, partnership management, innovation, design-thinking, and strategy deployment experience. She was featured on the CRN "Women Power 70" List and is on the advisory board for VR/AR, AI / Machine Learning, and IoT startups, and advancing initiatives for women in technology and leadership.
In this episode, Rika tells her story of becoming a leader in tech and how she arrived at NTT. She defines the role that connected industry plays within sustainability, and provides her thoughts on the future of edge computing including private 5G, blockchain, and the metaverse. Rika also provides advice for aspiring women in tech.
But before we get into it, here’s a brief word from our sponsors
[00:01:29] Narrator 2: Over the Edge is brought to you by Dell Technologies to unlock the potential of your infrastructure with edge solutions. From hardware and software to data and operations, across your entire multi-cloud environment, we’re here to help you simplify your edge so you can generate more value. Learn more by visiting Dell.com for more information or click on the link in the show notes.
[00:01:49] Matt Trifiro: Two years ago when I started the Over the Edge podcast, it was all about edge computing. That's all anybody could talk about. But since then I've realized the edge is part of a much larger red.
Pollution. That's why I'm pretty proud to be one of the founding leaders of a non-profit organization called the Open Grid Alliance for oga. The OGA is all about incorporating the best of edge technologies across the entire spectrum of connectivity. From the centralized data center to the end use devices, the open grid will span the globe and it will prove performance and economics of new services like private, 5G and smart retail.
If you want to be part of the open grid movement, I suggest you start@opengridalliance.org where you can download the original open grid manifesto and learn about the organization's recent projects and activities, including the launch of its first innovation zone in Las Vegas, Nevada.
[00:02:33] Narrator 1: And now, please enjoy this interview between Matt Trifiro and Rika Nakazawa, Group Vice President, Connected Industry & Sustainability for Americas at NTT.
[00:02:44] Matt Trifiro: Today I am here with Rka Nakazawa, and she is the group Vice President of Connected Industry and Sustainability for the Americas. At N T T, we're gonna talk about Rica's background in technology, her journey through the world of technology, her work at N T T, and her views on the present and imagined future of edge computing and sustainability.
[00:03:05] Matt Trifiro: Hey, Eureka, how are you doing today?
[00:03:07] Rika Nakazawa: Great. So Matt, why do I feel. You know, I live in Austin, Texas, so when I hear about the Over the Edge podcast, I feel like I'm in the beginning of like the Joe Rogan of Edge podcast for the future, like one of the founding second season members of this podcast. So I'm super excited to be here.
[00:03:25] Rika Nakazawa: Thank you, .
[00:03:25] Matt Trifiro: Well, thank you. It's funny, I, I actually meet people now and they're like, oh, I know you from [00:03:30] your podcast, and I never expected that to happen. So we do have a listenership and it is growing. So one of the things that, I mean, I spent about 20 minutes looking at your LinkedIn profile. You have a very rich history.
[00:03:41] Matt Trifiro: I mean, everything from Amex to Accenture with Sony and venture capital and Nvidia thrown in between. So you've done just about everything, but what I'm really interested in is how did you get interested in technology at
[00:03:54] Rika Nakazawa: all? Let's see. There's a lot of different dimensions to that question. Um, I'll start with saying, because I've been a woman in tech, this is something that's very near and dear to me, but I was a girl in stem.
[00:04:07] Rika Nakazawa: So I went to the international school, born and raised in Japan. Went to the international school and I took math and physics and organic chemistry and just really fell in love. Statistics, oh my gosh. When I try to remember all those challenges and problems, but so I really loved. Stem and actually steam.
[00:04:27] Rika Nakazawa: S t e A m I was into the arts as well. So we had this thing called the, uh, international Baccalaureate, and I took four higher courses and two subsidiary. My four higher were English art and then math [00:04:40] and chemistry, where the four. Okay, so complete left brain, right brain were always at war. And when I was going to college, I didn't really have the role model of somebody in technology.
[00:04:50] Rika Nakazawa: My father was an engineer, but it, but he went into business and worked for the big trading houses, a classic businessman. And so when I went to college, I didn't know what I wanted to major in. And fortunately for me, because of my high school degree and what I did with the International Baccalaureate, I could skip a year.
[00:05:08] Rika Nakazawa: But the problem was if you were gonna skip from freshman year to junior year, you need to declare your major. And I had no idea what I wanted to do. So you're in danger of graduating? I'm in danger of graduating. Exactly. And so I, so I took some time off from school. . And uh, when I tried to go back to school, it was around the time that Sony bought Columbia Tristar and back.
[00:05:31] Rika Nakazawa: This, I'm now completely gonna date myself, but uh, this is back when Japan was buying everything, right? When Japan was this enigma of the Japanese power, the Japanese were buying the statue of Liber. Well, I don't know if they were buying the Statue of Liberty, but I do remember a Thai magazine article on the front cover was a Statue of Liberty in a kimono to make the point that the Japanese are buying [00:05:50] everything, right?
[00:05:51] Rika Nakazawa: And it was a huge debacle. There was a book called Hit and Run, how John Peters and Peter Guber took Sony for a ride. And at the time I was thinking, gosh, that's what I should do. I should get involved in Japan, US business. And I literally wrote. Sony on a napkin, and it really tells to the story of how thoughts are things like Napoleon Hill Think Can Grow Rich, and all the other affirmation programs that are out there that are absolutely phenomenal.
[00:06:16] Rika Nakazawa: So I planted the seed of Sony, and then when I was in my senior year in college, I read about, and this is the early days, again, going to date myself, early days of the internet. And there was an article written about Independence day four and the website, how the website was this phenomenal website with Shockwave and all these for you cool kids today.
[00:06:38] Rika Nakazawa: I know you don't know what shockwave is, but anyway, so I, uh, made an excuse to interview one of the producers of the website. And so I was like, I'm a student, I wanna interview you. And they were doing this together with Sony. And as I was talking to them, I said, oh, by the way, you know, I, I'm really interested in Sony.
[00:06:56] Rika Nakazawa: I would love if you have any connections. And so, lo and [00:07:00] behold, they connected me with somebody submitted my resume. Didn't hear back. And then a few months later I got a response back from Linda Keeler, who was a, a vice president at a small group within Sony called Columbia Tristar Interactive. And it was this rogue group
[00:07:16] Matt Trifiro: that's, we called everything
[00:07:17] Rika Nakazawa: interactive to me, everything interactive, rogue group of revolutionaries.
[00:07:21] Rika Nakazawa: And so I interned there and then as I was graduating, they offered me a full-time role, which was not trivial because I was still an international student. I'm a Japanese citizen. And back then I was still on a F1 visa and transferring over solo and behold, unbeknownst to me, by virtue of pure accident of what I think I wanted to pursue, I ended up getting this job with this group of revolutionaries at Sony pic.
[00:07:47] Rika Nakazawa: What was to become Sony Pictures Entertainment, um, online, but it was Columbia Tries Interactive. And so we were there with innovators. We were doing things like Dawson's desktop. Do you know, have you heard, I don't know what Dawson's desktop is? Dawson's Creek. Remember dust? I do. So all the fan girls of Dawson's Creek had the opportunity to look into Dawson's desktop, his PC desktop, his email, what he [00:08:10] put into his trash.
[00:08:11] Rika Nakazawa: And you know, it was all very sort of voyeuristic. We did that, we did Wheel of Fortune online, we did, um, a lot of, uh, jeopardy online. So it was really, really the early days and for anybody who's listening to this and knows the name Robert Turik, I knew Robert Turik before Robert Turik was Robert Turik.
[00:08:27] Rika Nakazawa: You know, Robert's one of these extraordinary trailblazers now in the world of transformational technology. So I was there with the likes of Richard Glosser, IRA Rubenstein, I'm completely name dropping here, totally shamelessly. But I was with those, with those extraordinary pioneers in the world of, of interactive, of the early days of the internet.
[00:08:46] Rika Nakazawa: Yeah.
[00:08:46] Matt Trifiro: So I have to ask you this because in a previous life of mine, I co-founded a company called Wink Communications and we had Tova as an investor and through. Toshiba and Sony and Panasonic and a couple of other Japanese companies. We had the basis of our technology written into Japanese law and we were adding interactivity into the close captioning.
[00:09:10] Matt Trifiro: We were putting code basically into the close captioning portion of an analog video signal. So I'm wondering if you came across
[00:09:15] Rika Nakazawa: any of that. Not exactly that. So, so what was really [00:09:20] interesting, Steve Jobs has this wonderful phrase of you can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards.
[00:09:26] Rika Nakazawa: I didn't come across that, but my arrival to N T T now is actually quite nostalgic. And, and let me share the story with you. So I met Sony in Los Angeles having the time of my life in this new world order of the Internets in the world of entertainment, and hence the whole theme around disruption. So I was right out of the gate, I was in this role of disruptive tech, which became the hallmark for my career moving forward.
[00:09:53] Rika Nakazawa: I went back to Japan. My father felt ill, so I went back to Japan. And when this, uh, startup in Japan saw my resume, they're like, oh, she has internet experience. You know, she's, she, we, we gotta have her. And so I had the luxury of joining china.com, which was the iPod. I was an early, early I p O, you know, pioneered every since.
[00:10:12] Rika Nakazawa: Yeah, yeah. But, 1999. Oh, wow. Now I just gave like away my, my true ageism here. But, so in 1999, N T t DoCoMo launched this platform called Iode. I remember Iode Iode. I do. Right? So Iode [00:10:30] was iTunes before iTunes was iTunes, so I am sorry, but Apple is an amazing company. But N T t DoCoMo really were the trailblazers around creating a wall garden of content that they worked with the community of developers to create that.
[00:10:45] Rika Nakazawa: So I wasn't aware of that part, but I was there when the Japanese were really making waves around new ways in innovating models and policy and different instruments around that. Yeah. So, yeah. So in some ways I was, and I, and I was Earl early enough and old enough to remember the double bite challenges.
[00:11:06] Rika Nakazawa: Remember that the whole double bite with the Japanese conj and everything, but, uh, and probably, oh, yes. Right? Yes, yes.
[00:11:11] Matt Trifiro: Mm-hmm. . . Yeah, I do remember that. You know, you're, you're currently group vice president. I have to look to read this all group Vice President Connected Industry and sustainability. So first of all, what is a connected industry , and how does that relate to sustainability?
[00:11:26] Rika Nakazawa: Excellent. I'm so glad you asked that, Matt. Okay. So if you think about industry 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, and then industry 4.0, which is what everybody was heralding as the next wave of the way [00:11:40] that technology and digitalization was gonna transform industry, right? As we come out of Covid 19, it seemed too simplistic to think Industry 5.0.
[00:11:51] Rika Nakazawa: because that made it entirely too linear, right? And, and we all kind of went into this weird, and we never got to four. Not only did we never get back to four, but I c Covid 19 was this magic ball of chaos where we resurfaced. And I was like, what am I doing with my life? And then we resurfaced again. It's like, what's my job?
[00:12:09] Rika Nakazawa: Why am I going in an
[00:12:09] Matt Trifiro: office? Do I ever have to do it
[00:12:11] Rika Nakazawa: again? Right. , you know, what state am I living in? Why am I living here? So it was like a constant magic eight ball of things. And so I don't think it was linear anymore in the business sense. All joking aside, right? Enterprises, industries were massively disrupted and everybody had to, you know, you know the movie Space Balls and you know, ludicrous speed.
[00:12:29] Rika Nakazawa: Like we have to ludicrous speed our way through digitalization. And so for us at ntt, and when Shahe asked me, Shaha Ahed is our executive vice president who founded the New Ventures Innovation Group at NTT when he asked me to join. And we're thinking about, okay, so how do we talk about this next generation of the way that we translate technology to outcomes?[00:12:50]
[00:12:50] Rika Nakazawa: Accenture and I worked for Accenture. So my, I bow to my alma mater of sorts and we have some Accenture folks here. Uh, there's an Industry X group like Damnit. That's so cool. I wish they hadn't taken that. Like X, like the X-men. Yeah, like the egg industry. X like the X-men, so they're industry X. We're like, okay, well they took that.
[00:13:10] Rika Nakazawa: Okay, so what are we gonna call this? And we really wrangled for a while. And then we thought, why are we trying to think so deeply about this? It's connected industry and it's as simple as that. And not to make it monolithic either. It's not like, oh, it's an industry and now we're gonna figure out how to connect you.
[00:13:26] Rika Nakazawa: It's more about. The fact that it's all interconnected. That's our phrase at N T T. Do
[00:13:32] Matt Trifiro: you mean that both technologically but also in the sustainability sense is how the state of sustainability comes to do it? I mean,
[00:13:37] Rika Nakazawa: sustain sustainability is one of the key objectives that companies are looking to meet in their digital transformation journey, right?
[00:13:46] Rika Nakazawa: So we think about, when we talk about bridging technology to outcomes, it's like, okay, are you worker enablement? Is it productivity? Is it risk in compliance? Is it sustainability? I don't wanna diminish the role of sustainability is a big thing for me, but [00:14:00] when our clients are trying to think about how they're going to leverage digitalization and bang on the door, the cio, bang on the store, cto, it's all kinds of stakeholders who are doing that.
[00:14:10] Rika Nakazawa: And so sustainability is one, but there's a whole host of other outcomes that now the CIO needs to answer to in terms of how an organization is gonna operate. Because for us, we see this really beautiful convergence of IT and ot. and varying industries and varying companies are at different stages of it.
[00:14:28] Rika Nakazawa: And so that's, that's where we came to Connected Industries is because we really feel like that that connectivity is fundamental in table stakes for the data to travel, for the intelligence to be derived and for decisions to be made. Yeah, that's
[00:14:42] Matt Trifiro: really interesting. Let's come back to that. Okay. A lot we can talk about there.
[00:14:46] Matt Trifiro: Yeah. Before we do that, I wanna help people understand a little bit more about ntt. Okay. So, N t's a giant company, and I know it more historically than current. It was formed in the 1950s after at and t, after the post-war when at and t left the infrastructure. And it was a, a state organization as I understand it today.
[00:15:04] Matt Trifiro: That's a tiny piece of it. NTT does a lot of things. Can you give us a, just a, a wide [00:15:10] sweeping view of what ties all these different businesses and NTT together and what, what are the, the businesses that NTT is involved
[00:15:17] Rika Nakazawa: in? Yeah, so N T T I look when, uh, SHA Head came to me and he was at N T T, again, it was very nostalgic having grown up in Japan yet the, I'm actually the logo, it's on my lapel here.
[00:15:29] Rika Nakazawa: It was on manhole covers. N T T stands for an NPO and Telegraph. Telecommunications Telegraph. His obvious. Yeah, he was telegraph and telephone, let's be honest. Yeah, tele telecommunication. And so where NTT is today, there's a holding company, which is headquartered in Japan, and underneath the holding company are a number of different divisions.
[00:15:49] Rika Nakazawa: And so you'll have N T T DoCoMo and N NTT Communications. Those have now merged. We have NTT r and d. We spend close to, I think it's $4 billion on r and d, which is a sizable chunk. That's how committed we are. And we're doing some really interesting things around optics and communications called ion. And I could actually talk, uh, actually I would ask somebody else to talk more knowledgeably about that, but I love the work that we're doing there.
[00:16:13] Rika Nakazawa: N t t Limited, which was the group that I joined, uh, a little over about, almost a year and a half ago now. [00:16:20] N T T Limited was the infrastructure and managed services company. I'll just simplify it that way. That's not the official Okay. Official way to talk. But the fiber optics in the, in the ocean, the connectivity, the networks data center did, did Verio get rolled up
[00:16:34] Matt Trifiro: into that
[00:16:35] Rika Nakazawa: group?
[00:16:35] Rika Nakazawa: What happened was, in 2019, about 32 to 35 companies came together as N T T Limited. It was a combination of multiple companies that came together as limited. Most people know n t T data, n t t data has done a phenomenal job of being out there as thought leaders of sponsoring and their name and their logos are on the side of buildings.
[00:16:57] Rika Nakazawa: So most people know n t t data, n t t data is an, an incredibly powerful division with N N T T. That has done a lot around systems integration, application development, and also has been very active in acquiring a number of different companies. I think very was NTT Data, now that I think about it. So very good job of buying multiple companies, NTT Data and NTT Limited.
[00:17:19] Rika Nakazawa: So the infrastructure, call it the bottom up area from the infrastructure on up to the cloud, edge managed services and then NTT data that does a [00:17:30] lot of the application layer and a lot of the systems integration. We came together on October 1st of this year and we are now the infrastructure and the application systems integration company.
[00:17:42] Rika Nakazawa: So fully. Uh, we basically have the ability to help our clients around their digitalization journey. We have very strong consultancies within our organization and we have the assets that are able to deliver on a lot of the digital transformation roadmap that clients are looking to deploy. And increasingly we're taking it from an industry vertical approach because there's more specialization that needs to happen based on industry verticalization.
[00:18:09] Rika Nakazawa: You can't. Say anymore, I'm gonna help you with your land or your network or your data center. It starts to become very relevant. It has to be contextually relevant because of the convergence of OT and IT, and a lot of the operational aspects of it need to take into consideration the stakeholders that are gonna be very, depending on the industry that you're working
[00:18:28] Matt Trifiro: with.
[00:18:28] Matt Trifiro: Yeah. Can you give us like a really concrete example of one of your clients and where they started and where you've taken them to?
[00:18:35] Rika Nakazawa: I'm part of the New Ventures Innovation Group and we launched something called private 5g. [00:18:40] Okay. About this tiny little thing called private 5G . It's a big deal, right? It's all the buzz now, but it's a private 5G network that we can run as a managed service for our client.
[00:18:50] Rika Nakazawa: And so this is public knowledge, but we announced our, our collaboration with Schneider. Okay. So Schneider is also on the leading edge. Mm-hmm. , right around the data center and, and, and how they're providing electricity infrastructure and other things to clients and very, you know, incredible partner of ours in other respects.
[00:19:08] Rika Nakazawa: But we're helping them with their factories because one of the biggest challenges in manufacturing is that wifi is not reliable. It breaks down because of the concrete walls, especially in high hazard environments, which, you know, in, in factory environments you have a lot of different scenarios, but increasingly, one of the topics that has come up during Covid 19 because of the proliferation of endpoints of data input and output is security, right?
[00:19:33] Rika Nakazawa: Yeah. So we worked with Schneider to deploy a private 5G network in one other facilities to test out some use cases. Okay? So things around machine vision and agv, and I can't go into too much detail, but with them, what we've done is we've really helped them think [00:19:50] about the smart factory of the future.
[00:19:52] Rika Nakazawa: Because part of the private 5G conversation isn't necessarily, well, what can we do today? There is, there are elements of, here are some use cases that we can tackle today, but the forward thinking companies like Schneider are really thinking about how do they futureproof themselves? Because if they're going to invest in infrastructure today, it needs to be something that's gonna keep up with the speed of change, which has dramatically accelerated during covid 19.
[00:20:19] Rika Nakazawa: So we've helped them. And we are also helping an automotive manufacturer that I can't name. Unfortunately, they have a huge facility in a place in the us which I can't name either, but they have a huge facility. And one of the challenges that they were having is that there's a train track that runs through the facility.
[00:20:37] Rika Nakazawa: Their AGVs, autonomous guided vehicles are not the little things that you see on the floors of Amazon, right. That carry the stacks of things around. Their AGVs are honking big vehicles that carry other vehicles around the lot. And so for them, they need to have reliable wifi outside. Right. And, and it's a, it's a, again, a huge footprint of geography.
[00:20:59] Rika Nakazawa: God [00:21:00] forbid that suddenly the network goes down or something happens, and that a g v with the very expensive vehicle is smack in the middle of the train track kind of thing. Now, I'm exaggerating a little bit for, for, you know, storytelling perspective, but for them it was really about thinking about how are they gonna leverage private 5G to facilitate?
[00:21:19] Rika Nakazawa: And as we know during Covid, right, the automotive industry, the rush of demand was just phenomenal. And the automotive industry, they're continuing to change where they're becoming mobility companies. And there are, as we talked about today, vehicles are becoming edge devices, right? So very much a digitalized footprint that automakers are having.
[00:21:40] Rika Nakazawa: And so we're working with this one particular one. They have a couple of key use cases that they have in mind that are critical. Absolutely mission critical, because for anybody that's in manufacturing, you know, a downtime is a big, big challenge, right? It's, it just throws a, it throws a, a wrench into the whole, the whole, um, process.
[00:21:57] Rika Nakazawa: So across a number of different industries, we're starting to at least around private 5g. We've been really helping with their transformation roadmap and how they future-proof themselves, how they set themselves up for an agile way that can, [00:22:10] that they can continue to harness emerging technologies like private 5g.
[00:22:14] Matt Trifiro: Yeah. So what does that mean at a practical level? So I often ask the question, what is the difference between on-premises computing and edge computing? There is a difference, obviously, but it's hard to tease out what the difference is because we're putting computers and workloads at the edge, and I think it comes down to some of these softer qualities like agility.
[00:22:33] Matt Trifiro: And when you say, well, how do I have agility? Well, that may mean that it's not an isolated, siloed, single vendor solution that's operating entirely on premises. It may be extending back to the cloud. It may have some of the compute off-premises that there's a, a continuity through the entire, the entire cloud.
[00:22:50] Matt Trifiro: When you think. , what are the transformations that are happening? When you say digital transformation for a manufacturer, what does that mean? Like what, what are the things that are most important to their
[00:23:00] Rika Nakazawa: objectives? The way that I would frame it is that, so it's not just edge in isolation. Mm-hmm. , right?
[00:23:06] Rika Nakazawa: It's about the ability to do edge computing with the ability to have faster connection through private 5g, lower latency, higher data throughput. And you don't have, especially with the private 5G that we're working with, we have the notion of micro slicing. [00:23:20] So quality of service has become in, um, inherently needed when a, when a manufacturer, because you have a lot of competing devices, you have a lot of competing needs for connectivity and so, It's not just edge in isolation, it's about the ability for you to transmit data and relevant data at the edge and to be able to enable that processing to happen real time.
[00:23:42] Rika Nakazawa: And not just from one source, but multiple sources. Mm-hmm. . And to be able to synchronize that. And so when we work with our clients, it's, you know, P five G becomes part of a total way to think about Edge as a service, which is what we call it. So it's Edge computing, it's the iot. So being able to have the relevant sensors to be able to capture the data and be able to not, I mean, you don't need 5G for everything, right?
[00:24:05] Rika Nakazawa: You can have what we call zero G and you can have, you know, lower eye and other technologies that are gonna be able to Zero G is that Ethernet Zero you, the race is zero. It's wire, it's wires. Yeah. I, I have this a notion of, you know, from Zero to Hero or rather Zero be hero. But yeah, so for us it's really about the choreography.
[00:24:25] Rika Nakazawa: Of data, network and intelligence, that's really gonna help you be able to [00:24:30] harness what you can do. And as you said, it's a continuum. Sometimes you're going to have things that just stay on-prem, quote unquote. And then other times there are things that you need to have go out, back out to the cloud and back again.
[00:24:40] Rika Nakazawa: And so it's really a choreography. So Edge combined with AI is really gonna be what helps you automate some of those things because you, you know, it's high tax and high lift to imagine trying to track all of those things. And so it's bringing together all of those pieces and components. But again, , you have to do it in a way that's contextually relevant.
[00:24:59] Rika Nakazawa: So in the manufacturing, if you're working with a petrochemical company, there's probably gonna be certain things like the devices have to be friendly to those environments. Like a PC can't have a fan because if it's a petrochemical, you have corrosive chemicals that are flying through the air that are gonna destroy.
[00:25:15] Rika Nakazawa: I mean, there's all these things that you could really drill down into. And so, um, one of the things that we're doing at NTT as it relates to the application, because it's not about the speeds and feeds, it's about intersecting, technically feasible with strategically relevant and usable. So the whole design thinking aspect of how you deploy these things are also very important because you can't just look at technology in [00:25:40] absence of thinking about how are people going to use it and how do you derive the value in a way that's gonna be relevant to the key stakeholders to be able to say, here's my roi.
[00:25:48] Rika Nakazawa: Yeah.
[00:25:48] Matt Trifiro: And earlier in the interview you were talking about your business being. Outcome based. Mm-hmm. that there's a, a very much focus on the outcome. And I imagine if you're a manufacturer, you're looking to lower your costs, improve your quality, reduce your downtime, I mean, all of those things. And so when you do a customer engagement, like with a, like to modernize a factory, are those the kind of metrics that you, you're working with your clients on is like these like very specific outcomes that come down to real business value.
[00:26:17] Matt Trifiro: So
[00:26:18] Rika Nakazawa: the conversations, if they go to a TCO only then you, it starts to become commoditized, right? If it's just total cost of ownership, what you have to do is think about TCO combination with what's the value that you're deriving out of. So for example, in manufacturing, for anybody who's listening to this or anybody here today, you know, one of the biggest challenges that manufacturing industry has is worker shortage.
[00:26:42] Rika Nakazawa: I mean, that's been the case in general during covid 19. But in specific interests in logistics too, right? There's a lot of worker [00:26:50] shortage. And so how do you use these technologies to help you with worker enablement, right? How are you going to be able to get speed to on production site faster for the new trainee in a way that really facilitates them?
[00:27:02] Rika Nakazawa: Especially because from an experience perspective, it's hard enough to get somebody onsite and then once they're onsite, you wanna make sure that they stay so that they're not frustrated and trying to get trained up on something. So the KPI might be around work experience and talent retention, or the key metric could be around efficiency and worker safety.
[00:27:20] Rika Nakazawa: Safety is a huge issue like in manufacturing. Yeah. So safety and security is, is one of the things that is also because how do you put the price on a human life, right? Making sure that you're, you can use machine vision or to detect P P E or making sure that somebody that's not supposed to be in a place doesn't go in that place.
[00:27:37] Rika Nakazawa: There's a lot of ways to break down what the, how you define the value. . And so we run these workshops out of the possible workshops that really start to examine what are the key use cases and for whom and how are we amplifying the quality or quantity of a thing? And boiling it down to total cost of ownership doesn't really recognize those avenues, especially for an [00:28:00] organization that's trying to future-proof themselves.
[00:28:02] Rika Nakazawa: Because there's still, you know, there's three levels of knowing, you know what you don't know. Well, you know what, you know, hopefully, uh, you, you know what you don't know, and then you don't know what you don't know. And so when you're harnessing emerging technologies, there's still a lot of, you don't know what you don't know.
[00:28:17] Rika Nakazawa: So part of what my team does within connected Industry is that we co-innovate with our clients. We come into the sandbox together and we're like, okay, what is it that you're trying to solve for? What are the building blocks that NTT could bring together? And we have a powerful. Powerful arsenal of building blocks that we could help our clients with trying to solve those challenges.
[00:28:37] Rika Nakazawa: Let's prove it. Let's do a proof of value pilot in production and then once we prove what that value is, let's write the playbook so that you can then take that playbook to another facility. Not that it's gonna be apples to apples, of course, but the hope is that once we build a playbook for you, you can get a faster time to market to deploy and.
[00:28:56] Rika Nakazawa: So it's really about coming in, identifying what the values are, putting some qualitative, quantitative measure to it, identifying the key use cases, getting the right stakeholders around the table and agreeing that if we're gonna intersect technical feasibility with [00:29:10] strategic relevance and usability, this is what success looks like.
[00:29:13] Rika Nakazawa: Once we prove that out over a three to six month period, let's write the playbook so that you can take that to another facility in Mexico or you know, Stockholm or wherever in the world it's going to be. And of course, that's gonna be relevant to Spectrum as well. So as a global company, that's one of the benefits that we bring to a global organization is that you just need to work with us and we'll help you facilitate these things in other pockets around the world, pending spectrum availability in the way that we can make that happen.
[00:29:38] Matt Trifiro: Yeah. So it sounds like you're acting as a strategic consultant, an architectural consultant, a system integrator. a managed service provider, correct. Sort of all that's right. All at once, but is sort of through the whole life cycle. And I can't imagine a small company doing that cuz that that is quite a lot of resources to bring to bear mm-hmm.
[00:30:00] Matt Trifiro: to solve, solve a problem. That's, that's really interesting. And you know, we talked about the, the sort of outcome, outcome-based services, and I noticed it was either on the NTT website or maybe it was on your LinkedIn profile, there was a, a reference to NTT offering sustainability as a service. Right. So that, that's [00:30:20] fascinating.
[00:30:20] Matt Trifiro: That sounds very outcome-based. Yes. So first of all, what, how do you find a sustainability? What does that mean? ,
[00:30:27] Rika Nakazawa: from the announcements that we did at Mobile Congress, uh, sustainability is really focusing on net zero for us in that announcement. Okay. And really the focus is on climate. And I'm glad you asked that question because sustainability is many things, depending on where clients are thinking about it, what their motivations are.
[00:30:45] Rika Nakazawa: For us, one of the things that I, and I've been in a number of client conversations around the sustainability agenda. First they wanna know what are you doing NTT, to be green? And I'll use the word green because it's convenient, but they'll be like, okay, so we need to manage our scope Three, what are you doing to help make sure that when we do our ESG reporting or a 10 10 Q 10 K in our reporting that our vendors, our partners, our providers are checking the box for us.
[00:31:12] Rika Nakazawa: So we'll be like, okay, here, here are our, our commitments. And then the conversation or quite organically goes to, well, what are you doing for Scope one, scope two? Like, is there an opportunity for us to move from how we are being green for your IT to, how do we make it for [00:31:30] green? So how do we use infrastructure technologies and other ways to help you with your carbon footprint?
[00:31:37] Rika Nakazawa: Right in the climate equation. So what we announced two weeks ago in Las Vegas was a net zero impact solution in industry's first full end-to-end capability to do that. And that follows on the heels of announcement that we had, we soft launched something called iot for sustainability back in March and of of this year.
[00:31:56] Rika Nakazawa: We're still in 2022, right? Oh yeah, we are, yes. We're okay. Just a little bit longer. I know. It's just, uh, COVID has had this, uh, impact of time morphing. So for us, when we talk about sustainability as a service, it really is around taking key elements of thinking about your infrastructure and the ways that you are a, figuring out what you wanna measure, how you measure it, how you report it, how you display it from a dashboard across multiple key stakeholders.
[00:32:23] Rika Nakazawa: And then what can you do to. Using it and using technology. And there's a RAF of different ways that you could do that. And for us, to your point, it is first consulting led because we need to meet our clients where they are, because different clients are different points of their journey [00:32:40] around sustainability.
[00:32:41] Rika Nakazawa: And so we're
on
[00:32:42] Rika Nakazawa: that journey right now, especially for iot, for sustainability. With the iot group is run by my colleague Devin Young. And so he's built this whole portfolio of saying, here are the devices that we can use around water management, so water waste management, pollution detection, and other ways that we can use i t to measure things.
[00:33:01] Rika Nakazawa: Because if you don't measure it, then how do you know, you know what impact it has and how to improve it. So being able to use IOT and then the network and connectivity to be able to communicate those things and then to be able to intelligently display them to the people that need to see them is one of the ways that we can help our clients.
[00:33:18] Rika Nakazawa: Leverage technologies and IT for their own ambitions around sustainability. So we believe that we have this full stack solution in the sense that we're not going to monolithically go to a client and say, this is what we're gonna do for you. It's more like we have these building blocks. Let's understand where your, where your key challenges are today and how we can help you achieve some of the goals that you have.
[00:33:41] Rika Nakazawa: And what are some goals that you don't even know, realize that you could achieve. Right? You don't know what you don't know. So that's the journey that we're on. And one of the bigger areas is data [00:33:50] center. We have a very big data center footprint. We, we have the cloud providers in our data centers too, so we're right there with them.
[00:33:58] Rika Nakazawa: And fortunately everybody has a sustainability pulse coursing through their enterprise veins. So it's not that far flung for us to say, okay, as we green a fire, our data centers and get to our commitments there, right? How is that gonna in turn help our clients with their data center or their carbon footprint as a Scope three provider around their data center?
[00:34:18] Rika Nakazawa: And Schneider, they're very vehemently focused on how they're gonna improve the sustainability profile of data centers. And so that's another thing that we've been working with Schneider on. , stay tuned on that space. I don't think I can disclose much at the moment, but, um, they've been great partners with us in that regard as well.
[00:34:36] Matt Trifiro: Yeah, it, it seems like it's a, it's a bit of a paradox in a way because all of us in this room are using and deploying devices that consume resources. They all use electricity, and the more that we put out there, the more radios we put out there, the more servers we build, the more energy we're going to use.
[00:34:55] Matt Trifiro: And so how do we resolve that paradox? Is sustainability, in [00:35:00] your view, is the vector of sustainability going to cross the vector of growth? You know, I mean, is there a, is there a, can we keep up with it? Can our energy efficiency sensors and servers that are processing those sensors, Save more energy than they consume along with what they're measuring.
[00:35:21] Rika Nakazawa: that's like above my every grade . Like my pay grade, my school grade my, the answer's yes. Right? Yeah. Uh, yes. Well, so, you know, some of it is physics, right? Um, and some of it is just fundamental policy and also, um, uh, mindset shift and habit shifts that needs to happen. I think it's just like this whole ball of organic yarn, , but the way that I think about it is that there is the notion of circular economy recycling.
[00:35:57] Rika Nakazawa: So we can get much better with that. Let's manage the e-waste better. Let's figure out, and that's one of the things that we're focused on too with our clients, is as people move to software to find everything and hardware and recent, that software is [00:36:10] eating the world. And so hardware becomes less and less.
[00:36:12] Rika Nakazawa: Not less relevant, but not as needed is how do you recycle these things in a way. So it's regenerative. How do you use it for something else? And you know, there's a lot of smart brains and smart minds that are working on this. Gerard from McKenzie said this morning, right? It's a 275 trillion market over the next 30 years, 10 trillion every month, and all these decacorns and unicorns that are gonna be created.
[00:36:37] Rika Nakazawa: So I, I'm super optimistic that we are going to find a way to get there, especially with the next generation of entrepreneurs that are really focused on this space. I interviewed Jim Adler for my book, which I'll, I'll talk about in a mo moment too. But Jim Adler founded Toyota Motor Ventures, was the general partner that started that up.
[00:36:56] Rika Nakazawa: And in 2020 was the first year that they had a sustainability fund. So it was a, I think it was a $500 million fund that they started. Right. And in talking to other leaders, For my book. It's just been really inspiring hearing about how there's all this commitment to focus on this space. Because one of the things that we forget sitting in this room here in Santa Clara, the heart as [00:37:20] well, San Francisco would argue, but Santa Clara would say that they're at the heart of Silicon Valley.
[00:37:24] Rika Nakazawa: It's easy for us to forget that there's other parts of the world. There's 300 million people in India that don't have access to electricity. That's astounding. Yeah. 300 million people in India. So I saw this, this video with this woman. So tell me, are you telling me that the constraints that you, America is putting on the rest of the world around sustainability and energy consumption, you're going to withhold the opportunity for 300 million people to get access to electricity, which is about, you know, a little bit less in the, the population in the United States.
[00:37:56] Rika Nakazawa: Right. So we have to think about that because when we think, um, in this conference here today, we're like, okay, so you know, unicorns and we're gonna do all this recycling, regenerative, it's all gonna be beautiful. Meanwhile, there's still some things that have to happen in trade-offs that have to happen for equity for these other countries to be able to quote unquote, catch up with where we are.
[00:38:19] Rika Nakazawa: And, and the United States is still the largest consumer of electricity, by the way. Right? So I wish I could simplify it and say, yes, you know, there's gonna be this, this intersection [00:38:30] where. The sustainability is going to help bring us to carbon negative. And by the way, that's a, that's been a really interesting debate.
[00:38:36] Rika Nakazawa: Like I saw an advertisement from a very big name brand consumer package, like we're carbon positive. And I was like, wait, yeah, wait. Yeah, exactly. , is it carbon positive or is it carbon negative? I don't know which way it is. You know, I, and this morning, by the way, the talk that I gave, so this whole idea that we're in this anthropo scene, right?
[00:38:53] Rika Nakazawa: So the Holocene started 12,000 bc Holocene was when the earth was in its own equilibrium. It was just kind of going on its own, going through it, heat cycles, ice age, blah, blah, blah. But it was in an equilibrium over time, 12 for 12,000 years, that's been the hollow scene. And then we're now in this anthropo scene, anthropo scene being where humans are directly impacting the way that the rest of their earth is working.
[00:39:19] Rika Nakazawa: And that's frighten. And inspiring because the way that I, and I'm like, okay, let's, let's, the Anthrop scene started in 1950s during the industrial age is roughly when it started, when smoke stacks and all these things, right? So it's like, okay, uh, earth is really, I mean, humans are having this impact on earth.
[00:39:38] Rika Nakazawa: I say, [00:39:40] let's make the anthropo scene as short as we possibly can and move to the anthropo bit. Scene anthropo bit, uh, anthropo bit. Yeah, it's a mouthful, but let's move to the anthropo bit scene where humans and technology and digital are working together to create an equilibrium so that we can live and thrive without completely annihilating our ability to subsist collectively.
[00:40:06] Rika Nakazawa: I, I
[00:40:07] Matt Trifiro: like using the word equilibrium to define, at least in part sustainability that, that, that to me really, really strikes as, as having a truth to it. And I also, I share your optimism, you know, I think that, If you look at, I mean, there's an immense amount to go after just in waste. I mean, I think arguably, and there's some, been some people smarter than me that have estimated this, but certainly less than 30% of the CPU power on earth is used at any given time.
[00:40:40] Matt Trifiro: So 70% of it's wasted. It's probably plugged in. There's probably disk spinning and, and screens on. I mean, think about your phone, how, how much of your phone's processor is used at [00:40:50] any given time, and so the ability to double, triple, quadruple quintuple the number of workloads we run. Over on the existing servers and on future servers.
[00:41:01] Matt Trifiro: It just seems like an immense recapture opportunity for us. And then I was reading, they did a study on a, on a cellular network. One of the big goals for six G is, is to increase sustainability as an overall footprint in the, in the technology world. And they've done some studies with just turning off the radios when they're not needed, can save up to 40% of the power consumed in a radio network, which is extraordinary to me.
[00:41:26] Matt Trifiro: Mm-hmm. . So, I mean, do you see those kind of saving opportunities in some of the factory works that you do? Uh, or some of the, I mean, do, are there huge, like are there big pieces of low hanging fruit?
[00:41:37] Rika Nakazawa: Yeah. It goes back to if you don't measure it, you can't change it. So baseline with like, let's figure out how to measure stuff first.
[00:41:46] Rika Nakazawa: Right? Let's figure out where the biggest burns are, where the biggest consumptions are. Where the biggest, where the low hanging fruit is because until you measure it, you don't know where the low hanging fruit, you can roughly guess good argument for sensors. [00:42:00] Yeah. So, and facilities is, is one of the areas that we're looking at.
[00:42:03] Rika Nakazawa: So we, we have people on my team, not my team, but within N V N I that are part of the working group with the World Economic Forum for future of real estate or property, right. In facilities. And that's something that we're looking at it as well. But I think with every opportunity that we can find to be able to map and measure what those impacts are.
[00:42:23] Rika Nakazawa: And the other thing that, I think I mentioned this in a, in a different session and I'm gonna repeat it because I think it's really important for us to consider this, is that when we think edge, we tend to put a circumference around something and think, oh, edge, like my prem. We have to think that sustainability fundamentally is about considering the causal links of the butterfly that flaps its wings on one side of the earth, creating a tidal wave on the other side.
[00:42:49] Rika Nakazawa: And so, There's a lot of good intentions that's happening within sustainability in the way that things are gonna be managed. But unless we use Edge and collectively create a network of Edge Intelligence to demonstrate the impact that one action and initiative is gonna have for a group of stakeholders, and where that [00:43:10] happens downstream or upstream, then we're gonna be in a worse place.
[00:43:14] Rika Nakazawa: Or we just export our pollution and export our carbon. F. To other parts of the world from north to south, which is one of the big agenda items that we should use. Yeah,
[00:43:24] Matt Trifiro: it's, it's both exciting and probably unnerving to start measuring all those externalities.
[00:43:29] Rika Nakazawa: Mm-hmm. . Yeah. But Matt, I mean, you know, gosh, people, people, people are getting drinks.
[00:43:33] Rika Nakazawa: We should probably invite them up here and start talking about this because this whole topic of like, you know, are we, are we doomed ? Like, what are we doing? It's like the myth, I don't know if you know the Mythicist, the Mythicist is like rolling a rock up the hill, just knowing that it's gonna roll back down and you just kind of resign yourself to that line.
[00:43:53] Rika Nakazawa: no, it's fruitful. Like everything that we're doing in every moment. And that's the other thing, I, I feel like what we have to do is we have to have moments like this. We have to have podcasts like yours. We have to have conferences like edge computing world. We have to have the, all these billions of points of light in our galaxy of conversation.
[00:44:12] Rika Nakazawa: That illuminates the way forward. Because if you, as a single human being, if you try to imagine what impact us or a group of
people
[00:44:19] Rika Nakazawa: [00:44:20] could have, it's overwhelming. But as long as we can come together and really not just talk about it because it's a hot topic, we must talk about it. But let's find ways to be able to get the small wins that eventually lead to some of the bigger opportunities.
[00:44:36] Rika Nakazawa: Let's turn to the
[00:44:37] Matt Trifiro: future, and I have basically two questions. So one of them is when you look out at the future, and whether this is from a business standpoint or even a personal standpoint, like, but with a, the lens of edge on it, what's most exciting to you?
[00:44:50] Rika Nakazawa: What is most exciting? So blockchain excites.
[00:44:56] Rika Nakazawa: and that's a whole nother debate, right? The whole crypto world. And how fast as an investor or as a technologist, , as an no, as a, as a technologist, I'm, I'm not much of an investor. I now you no pointer. I'm not a hoer hoer that the term ho Huddler huddler. But I think that blockchain and Dows right, the distributed autonomous organizations, the ability for communities to come together to create transparency around things, which is also, I think gonna help the, uh, sustainability agenda and pierce through the veil.
[00:45:26] Rika Nakazawa: That's really interesting,
[00:45:27] Matt Trifiro: right? Green Washington, you can't alter the records of your, your [00:45:30] pollution. It's gonna be
[00:45:31] Rika Nakazawa: No. Pretty clear. Interesting. I mean, en inha bushed at this really cool thing where you can like the, on some of their beer cans. I'm not a beer drinker, so I, this is not an empirically validated full disclosure, but apparently you can scan a barcode or something on one other cans and it tells you what the.
[00:45:47] Rika Nakazawa: Oh, the barley is , like the farmer, the name of the farmer, how the, the name of the farmer Farms. It could be, you know, that's true. I just made that word up. I was like, yeah, you know, farms, let's take taking the gender piece. Chair. Chairwoman Chairperson. Yeah, chairwoman chairperson. So I'm pretty excited about this whole idea of Web three and Dows and blockchain.
[00:46:09] Rika Nakazawa: I think that it's gonna create an opportunity for us to get past a lot of the challenges and issues that we have around some of the, not to wax political, but neoliberalism and, and, and, you know, the, the way that, you know, make X Grade again. And a lot of the, you know, being bicultural and having grown up multicultural, it's really hard for me to understand that ethos, although I, I get it on a intellectual level.
[00:46:32] Rika Nakazawa: So I'm pretty excited about how technology is really gonna break down barriers and help us really, uh, [00:46:40] unite. And that's also why I think sustainability is. A good topic to create a culture in absence of one in a lot of pockets today. So I do a lot of work in DE and I. I have been doing a lot of work in what?
[00:46:55] Rika Nakazawa: What is that? Diversity, equity, inclusion. Okay, thank you. Actually, it was diversity inclusion, diversity, equity, inclusion, diversity, equity, belonging and inclusion. And my position now is that diversity, equity, inclusion will in some ways take care of itself. If we can help organizations really anchor around culture.
[00:47:16] Rika Nakazawa: I think culture is in a crisis. And so I think that the way that organizations thrive is through culture and the way that you can align a purpose. Purpose-driven business is a big topic as well, and I think that technology can really. Really create that point of light around key areas that people wanna rally around, like Edge for sustainability or blockchain for Metaverse or you know, all these things.
[00:47:41] Rika Nakazawa: So I'm pretty excited about where we're go edge. Absolutely. I think AI intelligence, being able to automate some things that can [00:47:50] help the total system work together and create that view on the calls and links of everything. I think blockchain metaverse, let's talk about Metaverse for a moment. Okay. Yeah.
[00:48:00] Rika Nakazawa: Let's talk about the Metaverse. Sure. So I was in a meeting, and this was not NTT related, it was for a company that I advised and they're like, oh, check out our Metaverse, that is the portal to other metaverses. And they showed this scene of like Spaceship Console and I was just like, okay. And um, you know, the developer did a lot of work to create this environment.
[00:48:25] Rika Nakazawa: I worked for Nvidia back in 2006 and I was like, uh, I mean, did you take some things from Unreal Engine and like, you know, kind of stitch it together because you know that we've been doing that within the gaming industry for a long time. And so it's really interesting to see the way that people are trying to leverage the notion of Metaverse if they haven't been in the gaming industry, for example.
[00:48:47] Rika Nakazawa: And no disrespect because they're excited about it, which is cool and that's great, but let's be really intentional when we talk about Metaverse. And it was a fantastic session earlier where CS Health and Lowe's and [00:49:00] and Accenture were talking about the ways that Metaverse was coming to life in their enterprise.
[00:49:04] Rika Nakazawa: And so creating these digital twins and all those things, I think that that's really fantastic. But I, I actually, that's gonna help around sustainability too, right? If you can create a virtual environment and not waste a lot of resources and people and stuff, right? If you can set up a virtual store so you know how you're gonna merchandise everything versus having to create a bunch of stuff that you're gonna destroy anyway afterwards.
[00:49:26] Rika Nakazawa: So I think that there's elements of Metaverse that I'm really excited about. I'm just, I'm just, I just hope that it doesn't get blown outta proportion in terms of like Ready Player one if it hasn't already. Well, yeah. Like Ready Player one. Have you seen some Ready Player One, right? Yes. It's like, wow.
[00:49:41] Rika Nakazawa: Like on the one hand that's kind of cool because you can be anybody that you wanna be in the med in that kind of a metaverse. But we're very excited about the, the, the New Ventures innovation. That's what we're focused on. We're focused on where, where things are going and, and Edge. Right. We're here at this conference celebrating the edge in all the different ways that Edge is gonna transform and innovate.
[00:50:01] Rika Nakazawa: Edge has been around for a long time, but Edge has come out as a resurgence in a new way. Right. So Edge is the new Edge Black, I don't [00:50:10] know, like . Yeah. You know, and so I think that there's certain technologies that we're gonna see come back again in a, in a new and different way. And honestly, what I hope it does is, is that it unites, I'll give another example actually, if I may please.
[00:50:25] Rika Nakazawa: So I interviewed a woman that is with the Ministry of Digital Transformation for Ukraine. And how I met her was, I was at South by Southwest earlier this year, and everywhere she went, it was like the waters parted. Like people just made way for her because everybody knew who she was before she even showed up.
[00:50:44] Rika Nakazawa: Because this is in March and she was the only person from the Ukraine. That like road cross country to Germany went on horseback. I'm making that part up. She like went through heaven and earth to get to Austin so that she could be there to be the voice of Ukraine at the beginning of the invasion and the crisis there and, and the, the chaos.
[00:51:05] Rika Nakazawa: So, you know, I respected her as she was moving around and then later on she showed up again. And so I approached her. I said, can I interview for my book? I'm writing a book about esg, digital transformation and the pandemic. So we made an [00:51:20] appointment, she was back in Keith, and she comes on the Zoom and first thing she says, she's like, I'm very sorry, but if the sirens start to go off, I'm gonna have to terminate the interview.
[00:51:30] Rika Nakazawa: I was like, of course. Right? She's telling me sirens are gonna because there's bombs going off. I'm like, oh my God, this is crazy. She told me this extraordinary story about the journey that Ukraine's been on, and this is, we had the interview around May timeframe, so. . When Zelensky came into power, one of the first things that he did was he created this ministry of digital transformation.
[00:51:53] Rika Nakazawa: And the, one of the tasks that the ministry was tasked with was to ensure that mobile devices was as prolific as possible in the country. So getting into the hands of the elderly, getting into the hands of the underprivileged, so on and so forth. And as some of you know, probably right near Ukraine in that region is Estonia.
[00:52:12] Rika Nakazawa: Estonia is a, is very much a model of the digitalized, digitally enabled government for the people. And so in some ways, thinking about that model, like, okay, so where do we start? We need to get devices into the hands of our citizens. And so they mobilized a whole task force to try to get [00:52:30] grandma and, you know, these neighborhoods to use these mobile devices.
[00:52:35] Rika Nakazawa: And when the invasion happened, they massively accelerated what was like a a year roadmap. They shrunk that into a matter of months because they had to. . And by the time that when the Russians came in and they had already distributed these mobile devices, and Oh by the way, sorry, I jumped ahead. Covid happened.
[00:52:57] Rika Nakazawa: So first before the Russians happened, , that's a weird way to put it. The Russians invaded. Covid happened. So they pulled that timeline in. They're like, we really need to get these devices into the hands of, of citizens so that we can communicate with them, because everybody needs to be at home. It's a healthcare crisis, the whole thing.
[00:53:15] Rika Nakazawa: So they accelerated that timeline, got these devices into a significantly larger group of people within Ukraine, and then when the Russians invaded, now, they had already embedded a communication means to the people of Ukraine. So whilst Covid 19 was catastrophic and terrible, and people died, imagine if Ukraine [00:53:40] hadn't mobilized.
[00:53:41] Rika Nakazawa: This penetration of mobile devices as a means to weaponize communications against Russia. Right? Which is a story that came up in all these things. Yeah. So I bring that story up, Matt, because that's a really good example of something that we're like, oh, mobile phones. How yawn, let's move on to something more sexy and excited.
[00:54:00] Rika Nakazawa: It's like, no, actually this is an example of old technology that became mobilized into creating a new way that a nation state was gonna de defend their sovereignty. And I thought that that was extraordinary. So these are the kinds of stories of ways that we can reinvent technology and synergize it with other emerging technologies like AI and Metaverse and other things that creates a fabric in a way that we don't even imagine what it's like today.
[00:54:28] Rika Nakazawa: But I do hope, I really hope that the direction that we're going around ESG and sustainability and all these other things means that what we have been doing at N T T, which is technology for good. Is gonna be for not just technology for good, but technology for how we thrive. Yeah. That's
[00:54:46] Matt Trifiro: nice. We're coming up on the top of the hour.
[00:54:48] Matt Trifiro: Oh, ready. And we're getting overrun by the [00:54:50] bar, but I know, I would, I would like to ask one more question. So, as a woman in technology who's had a long career, I mean, you're a pioneer in many senses in the technology world. Many people in my audience, many of my peers, many of my friends have daughters. And so what is your advice to the young women and perhaps to their parents from your experience?
[00:55:15] Rika Nakazawa: So I think fearlessness, fearlessness is, is actually something that we don't That's a good one. Yeah. Yeah. If you're, listen, oh, the, the girl, the girl in the bull, the, the, the one in Wall Street where she's standing there with her arms like this. I think that one of the inspirations that should be for women today, the daughters of your friends, is that more women are gaining roles on corporate board.
[00:55:40] Rika Nakazawa: Not just public company boards, but private boards, private equity, the numbers are still way too small, but they're gaining ground. And one study that I read that I wanted to bring to this audience here is that one of the roles by which more women are gaining roles on boards is being the chief digital officer.[00:56:00]
[00:56:00] Rika Nakazawa: In other words, that role, that really orchestrates a lot of the different ways that technology is going to impact functional operations within an organization. And so women have found a way to really play a powerful role in that sense of an orchestrator. And so there is an opportunity for women to gain board roles through that.
[00:56:22] Rika Nakazawa: And I would say that women have tended to make up a large part of a human resources organization, which is now the people office, chief people officer, chief talent officer, thank God. Because human resources just sounds way too, you know, 1950s. But. So during the pandemic, the boardroom leader, the everybody around the boardroom table, so let's go to like 2020, may of 2020, the board members were like looking at each other like, we need to mobilize everybody.
[00:56:51] Rika Nakazawa: Everybody needs to work from home. And then they were like, where's the HR person? We need to ta talk to the HR person. Prior to the pandemic, the C H R O or the chief people officer wasn't necessarily a, a desirable profile for a board. It's typically been CEOs, CFOs, that kind of thing. But now they're like, oh, we need, we need the people officer in here.
[00:57:09] Rika Nakazawa: So [00:57:10] more women are gaining rules on the board through HR functions and also through the digital functions. And also there's a lot more focus and effort around women founded companies because a lot of the startups and unicorns, the more and more women are gaining the opportunity with the foot in the door around the impact that they can have through those roles.
[00:57:31] Rika Nakazawa: And just know that there's more money going into this space. There's more focus going into this space. Or organizations like Chief and Strides, which is a platform that I started a a few years ago with some people around bringing more women on boards. There's more and more focus coming into this space.
[00:57:45] Rika Nakazawa: And here with Tokyo, I know Toia has been really
focused
[00:57:48] Rika Nakazawa: on Women on the Edge. And I think, you know, Gavin and Felipe and team really focusing on putting the spotlight on, celebrating some of the accomplishments that have been happening in this space because Ada Lovelace wrote some of the first computer code that we know of, right?
[00:58:05] Rika Nakazawa: And so, and Grace Hopper was another phenomenal stalwart within the space of technology. So there's a lot of really fantastic points of light that should be the inspiration. A lot of focus that's going into this. There's way more that needs to be done. [00:58:20] And for example, I was in New York and I was sitting next to a woman that's been doing a lot to get more, and she's a Afghani woman.
[00:58:27] Rika Nakazawa: She's not in Afghanistan, she's been working from the us but she's working on how she's going to use blockchain to empower women in Afghanistan. So there's a lot of work that's going on to empower women that are even less, that are even more constrained than we are here in the US and other parts of the west.
[00:58:44] Rika Nakazawa: So I would just say to the, is that, oh, oh, and one other thing I'll say, what's been really refreshing is that as I've been talking to these parents, your friends, my friends, they're like, you know what, my kids don't seem to have an really like focusing on gender equality. Like they don't, they don't see that it's not a thing for them.
[00:59:01] Rika Nakazawa: I noticed that as well. Yeah. Yeah. It's not a thing for them. It's really encourage, you know, they don't see color. They don't, you know, so I don't know. I don't know if it's gonna be, they can
[00:59:09] Matt Trifiro: see avatars on Minecraft, ,
[00:59:11] Rika Nakazawa: and like avatars. And by the way, media too, right? You see more kick? Pardon? My kick ass woman that are, you can say that on my show.
[00:59:18] Rika Nakazawa: Okay. Okay. Kick kick ass women that are um, that are really fierce, right? Fierce, fearless, anti-fragile. That are just coming into the space, and it really is about [00:59:30] diversity of everything. I, it's, this isn't about pro-women and all about women. We need to over-index, but we need to celebrate the opportunity that diverse teams bring together and to be able, and what in transgender too, right?
[00:59:44] Rika Nakazawa: Another big area that, that's really been surfacing. So I would give the advice of be fearless, be fierce, just celebrate anti-fragility and go out and, and dare and, and just know that we are tapping into a very, very, very small fraction of what our capabilities and our potential are. We're tapping into so little of what we know about our human brain, about our capability.
[01:00:07] Rika Nakazawa: We're doing it a little bit metaphorically with all the stuff that we're doing with edge and computing and all those things. But if we can just collectively tap into much more of what we're capable of and change the mindset about how we're programmed ourselves. Then, then it's limitless what we can accomplish together.
[01:00:23] Rika Nakazawa: So, and also, you know, reach out to me on LinkedIn. I would love to connect with you. Here are some of the ways that you're, well, that actually is my final question.
[01:00:30] Matt Trifiro: How can people find you if they find all this internal, how interesting and they wanna follow up?
[01:00:34] Rika Nakazawa: Yeah, so I'm writing a, my next book, I published a book last year about women on corporate boards, [01:00:40] which is an area that I've been devoting a lot of passion and time to.
[01:00:43] Rika Nakazawa: Dear Chair Woman's the title right? Dear chairwoman, it's on Amazon. Yeah. Dear Chairwoman and thank you for the plug. My next book I'm writing about my thesis for the next book is that pandemic was a time that we saw ESG and sustainability really rise and accelerate. And I call it a white swan. The white swan phenomena.
[01:01:01] Rika Nakazawa: Yes. I'm trying to go toe to toe with Nasim Tale and his Black Swan story. So I'm writing this book and one of the things that I'm looking for and why I would love for anybody to reach out to me, but particularly young women, parents of women that are trailblazing, is really these points of light. Where over the past two to three to four years, especially during the time of the pandemic where this realignment of purpose, right, the great resignation and, and the, and the quiet quitting and other things that are going on right now is I think a renaissance of the human spirit.
[01:01:36] Rika Nakazawa: And what I would really love to examine is how, in what ways that human spirit is being amplified and activated through the power of technology and through the power of how we're connecting as individuals. And so I would love to incorporate those [01:01:50] stories because like I said, the book is intended to be constellation of inspiration and stories.
[01:01:55] Rika Nakazawa: And so please reach out to me. You can find me on LinkedIn. There's a couple of Rico Naza on there. I'm the one that you can't tell is Japanese, but I am Sony, Nvidia.
[01:02:04] Matt Trifiro: Sony, Accenture, American Express.
[01:02:07] Rika Nakazawa: Yes. NTT and N T T.
[01:02:10] Matt Trifiro: Right. So, oh, thank you Rka so much for being on the podcast. We'll put as many links into the show notes as we can for all those resources, including your LinkedIn profile.
[01:02:18] Matt Trifiro: The correct one, your books, well, your book. When is your new book gonna be out?
[01:02:22] Rika Nakazawa: Well, I'm hoping by Earth Day next year, so April.
[01:02:26] Matt Trifiro: Okay. We'll watch for it. Okay. Thank you
[01:02:28] Rika Nakazawa: Rka so much. Thank you, Matt. Great to be here and look forward to hearing more of your, your shows in the future. Thank you. Bye. Thanks. That does it for this episode of Over the Edge.
[01:02:37] Rika Nakazawa: If you're enjoying the show, please leave a rating and a review and tell a friend. Over the Edge is made possible through the Jenna sponsorship of our partners at Dell Technologies. Simplify your edge so you can generate more value. Learn more by visiting dell.com.