The growth of the Internet and shift toward distributed, Web-based computing has caused an enormous expansion of the number of servers and applications in data centers, resulting in massive complexity that traditional, manual operations cannot accommodate. Increasingly, companies are turning to automation and service providers are automating hosting services to reduce operations costs and improve the security and quality of the operations environment.

"Customers today are looking to reduce operations costs without sacrificing the quality and uptime in their data center operations," said Kazu Yozawa, VP IT Management Services Business Division, NTT Com. "Opsware and EDS give NTT Com's AGILIT hosting service a powerful competitive edge that will greatly differentiate our service offering. By leveraging Opsware's industry leading automation software, and EDS' hosting expertise and processes, AGILIT will be able to provide customers a highly secure, high quality, fully automated hosting offering."

"EDS has been able to achieve superior service levels integrating Opsware into our automated hosting services worldwide," said Jeff Kelly, vice president of EDS Infrastructure Services. "We look forward to working with NTT Communications and Opsware to shape the future of the Japanese hosting market and are pleased to introduce a service that is unmatched and unprecedented in the region."

"Service providers worldwide are using Opsware automation software to help them reduce costs and deliver unparalleled, higher value application services to customers, versus commodity hosting-only services," said Ben Horowitz, president and CEO of Opsware Inc. "NTT Com's AGILIT hosting service, powered by EDS using Opsware automation software, will provide corporations in Japan a compelling outsourcing alternative that dramatically reduces their IT costs, while simultaneously improving quality and responsiveness of their business-critical applications."