Deepak Satya, Executive Managing Director, Cloud and Security, and India Head, NTT Data

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H S Manjunath

Urging the need to retire calling some Indian cities as tier-2 or tier-3, Deepak Satya, Executive Managing Director, Cloud and Security, and India Head, NTT DATA, has stressed the need to call them as AI-ready cities.In an informal chat with businessline during his visit to Mangaluru recently, Satya said: “We should stop calling some of our cities as tier-2, tier-3 and all those things. No where do we see that any of our cities are in any way tier-2 or tier-3. I was proposing that we call Mangaluru AI-ready city.”He said: “Nobody can say we have got 20 years experience working on Claude, nobody can say that we have got 15 years experience working on OpenAI. We are all on a level-playing field, and this is our time to capture this moment and just leapfrog whoever is That is the opportunity that we have.”He said the focus now is building globally relevant teams in such cities, and grooming leaders. Referring to the recent acquisition of some companies in Udupi-Mangaluru region by global players, he said Mangaluru has proven that.In 2025, NTT acquired the Udupi-based Niveus Solutions, a cloud engineering company specialised in Google Cloud Platform services.Sathya said around 1,000 team members of Niveus Solutions are now part of the larger 40,000 workforce of NTT DATA in India.He said his company is trying to bring people in his leadership team to Mangaluru when they are in India. “We make sure that they come to Mangaluru and see the vibrance and potential that this city has. We will not leave any opportunity to bring our leadership teams into Mangaluru and have meetings here, spending probably three-four days looking at what the potential is,” he said.Satya said he is also speaking with his peers and colleagues in other global practices to see whether they can also expand in Mangaluru.He said the strength of NTT Data’s team (through the acquisition of Niveus) was around Google platform. But now the team is not restricting themselves only to the Google platform. “We are working at other technologies, other platforms as well, like Amazon, Microsoft, various other things,” he said.Published on July 13, 2026