Putting the service into global services: services integration, not network management, is the mantra of BT Global Services. CEO Andy Green speaks with group editor Robert Clark about the failure of network-centric Concert, and business potential from serving today's distributed global MNCs - One-To-One - Brief Article

Telecom Asia, Nov, 2003 by Robert Clark

Telecom Asia: Introduce BT in the region, and BT Global.

Andy Green: BT Global is BT's IP and services business, and we have a very straightforward structure outside the UK. We just concentrate on multi-site organizations--that's corporate and government customers with complicated communications needs. We've got 21,000 people, and 13,000 of them are in the services space--people who work in network management, outsourcing, systems integration, CRM systems, those types of things, rather than running and building networks. And I think that relatively sharply differentiates us from most of our competition. We have $4 billion of contracts in the services space and out of a total business of around $7 billion.

And that's where the business is these days, in managed services, rather than running networks?

Absolutely. [In] this region in particular, any corporation, if you're looking to operate across it, recognizes pretty clearly that no one is going to own all the infrastructure that's necessary to serve them. Because there are many parts of the region where there are still monopolies. Our task is to manage the total end to-end service for the customer and to ensure effectively that the applications work.

We've had lots of discussions about CRM systems and ERP systems and SAP and all those sorts of things. And they've been installed, but for many organizations, they're only now getting seriously to grips with the sense that, really what's going to drive the productivity in those systems is networking them, and we're seeing significant drives to centralize the applications and the database management and storage and distribute it out to people.

And BT Global sees itself playing a role all the way from hosting some the applications right down to the enterprise networking?

The primary thing we do is we run integrated networks that deliver service to the customers that they require.

Now my view of it is that increasingly that's the nervous system of a modern company. Think about companies like Ryan Air, which created a business which is the third largest market capitalization for an airline, and they've done it in the middle of a downturn in the industry. And they've done it by moving self-service to their customers. You see a lot of backwards integration into the supply chain, and a lot of these processes are being managed better internally. A lot of things we would have had our admin staff do a few years ago we would now get our employees to do online. They do their travel, they do their expenses, all those types of things [online]. So lots of things that we used to get done with admin staff we can now do online. All of that creates major productivity savings.

On top of that we see this whole idea of consolidation. We see people consolidating call centers, we see them consolidating their data centers. With all the virus attacks that are going on, people are really concerning themselves both with the efficiency and the security of running a very dispersed data infrastructure. So they're tending to consolidate that and push it back out to users where they are.

At the extreme, one or two of the big banks are talking about one big data center in the southern hemisphere and one in the northern.

Talk a bit then about what customers want these days. The tightening of the last few years must have changed their behavior.

I would say it is these four trends. It's the networks company that we talked about, it's the consolidation that we talked about. It's globalization. So they're significantly moving their software activity and their call center activity from high-wage economies to low-wage economies. And finally it's more for less.

What's happening in most organizations is that, despite all those trends requiring you to have more bandwidth going to more places and more MIPS and all those sorts of things, they're being told their budgets are cut. I run our own IT, and the pressure I put on our people to do more for less. When I talk to CEOs all around the world, it's almost universally true that people are expecting to get more bang for the buck.

Now what we have done, very aggressively compared to anyone else in the industry, is drive IP-VPNs into that. What they do is two things. They bring a significant cost reduction over what are normally several networks, voice, data--probably more than one, because different divisions do different things--onto a single practical architecture that allows you to do those centralizations.

If you want to move a call center from Hong Kong to Shanghai, if you've got a VPN in place you've basically got to make sure that Shanghai has a new entry point into the network and take down the other one and it's done. Whereas in the past you would have had to network it in with all your other sites and locations separately, because the virtual private network provides a cloud which immediately allows for the reconfiguration.

We do all the hard work of that. Reconfiguring a private circuit network, and making big changes like that, you have to do tons of work in advance to get it all organized, and run duplicate networks for awhile. You can absolutely simplify that, plus you get a much better deal.