Microsoft struck a multi-year deal with Japanese communications giant NTT to combine its Azure cloud platform and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities with NTT’s optical and wireless network to produce and support new enterprise-focused digital services.

The work includes a global digital fabric that will combine Microsoft’s cloud and NTT’s ICT infrastructure to bolster their respective public cloud, global data center, and network infrastructure. Those platforms, in turn, will be used to help their enterprise customers to enact digital transformation goals.

That focus will also target security features for digital services built on Azure that link an enterprise to the edge and to the cloud. This includes analytics for cybersecurity threat intelligence, what the companies’ term “social robotics with relational AI for digital companions,” and knowledge discovery and management. (This work is similar to a recent announcement from IBM Security that integrates AI to boost cloud-based identity and access management services.)

Microsoft has been working on integrating AI into Azure for several years. This includes an AI research hub designed to speed up the integration of AI into products and services.

The alliance also makes Microsoft’s Azure NTT’s preferred cloud platform for modernizing its own global IT infrastructure and customer services targeted at analytics, cybersecurity threat intelligence, and hybrid-IT management.

The companies are also working on all-photonics networking and digital twin computing as part of NTT’s Innovation Optical and Wireless Network (IOWN) concept. That work is focused on developing an optical-based networking and information processing platform to provide a “more natural” interaction platform for innovation and sustainability efforts.

NTT recently formed the IOWN forum with Intel and Sony. It’s focused on combining silicon photonics, edge computing, and distributed connected computing converge to bring people from all walks of life together. The digital twin computing work will allow real-world problems to be recreated in cyberspace where it can model human behavior through societal models.