21st century man: BT is the latest old-school global carrier to reinvent itself for the age of convergence. BT Group chief technology officer Matthew Bross, who is overseeing the carrier's radical transformation from stovepiped services and disparate networks to a unified multi-service network that supports rapid service rollout, briefs global technology

Telecom Asia, Sept, 2004 by John C. Tanner

Telecom Asia: Let's start with the transformation BT is putting itself through in terms of the 21st Century Network concept.

Matthew Bross: There's been three areas of transformation. First, there's been transformation of the leadership of the company. Second, there's been a clear transformation of the balance sheet of the company, bringing the debt under 10 billion [pounds sterling], which gives us the financial capacity to do the third thing, transform our business model. This is really a shift from a 100-year agenda of delivering capacity in the markets to delivering capabilities and services on top of that. The 21st Century Network program we've got underway is enabling infrastructure to be able to rationalize the portfolio, to be able to accelerate and extend what we're doing in broadband, to be able to launch our mobility strategy, and to unleash our ICT strategy. So it's about moving from calls and lines to some significant capabilities where it's much more about relevant services to your customers, as opposed to connectivity choices.

How exactly is the business model changing?

One major aspect was the transformation of system choices, where we would move from a model where the product houses developed their own "stovepipes" of systems, if you will, and went into the marketplace with their own product, to a set of system building blocks in which we can put presence, messaging, authentication, content repurposing--ingredients that will be embedded in products and services.

In BT, if you take the product development environment, each one of those product managers goes out, they have an idea for a new service, and they will build presence, messaging, authentication, all that, into their product. But if you're a customer of BT, and you happen to be looking at, say, the top ten things you can buy from BT, your experience may be that it's a different authentication method across all ten, or it's different messaging across all ten. It's not quite that bad, but that's the scenario you could end up with. In 21CN, what we can do is we can go into the marketplace with these reusable capabilities, and make sure there's a common look, smell, taste and feel across those services.

The next option is to radically simply the number of networks. We operate many service-specific networks today--ATM, frame, IP, yada yada yada- and we wanted to transition those into a single multi-service network. And the third option was a radical simplification in the topology by driving fiber deeper into the network. What is different today is that we've implemented system changes--going from the stovepipes to the reusable capabilities, going to a hub architecture and creating a service creation/service execution environment that allows us to get into the market much more quickly.

So how do you get from the old model to this new convergence model?

21CN has three main goals. One is, we've externally communicated a 1 billion [pounds sterling] reduction in the cost of operating the networks. If you look at just the access part of the network, there's over 100,000 devices in the BT network that wireless, fiber or copper terminate into that create the whole myriad of service delivery. With 21CN and multi-service access type devices, that number could be 30,000. Just the simplification from many devices on service-specific networks into a multi-service network we think will yield significant cost savings.

The second goal is a 3x improvement in service velocity in bringing new services to market. Going from stovepipes to reusable capabilities ends up driving that. And the third [goal] is empowering our customers to have greater control of the network as if they had built it themselves, which creates a very different customer experience. If you can put together the network to be much more relevant to customers, and the network is a multi-service network that allows them to flex what it's doing for them in a much more tailored, personalized way, then the third objective emerges.

How does BT decide which new services to launch with this new flexibility?

I have this crazy view of customers, which is: One, we don't have a clue what they want. Two, they don't have a clue what they want. Three, they'll definitely know a good thing when they see it. Some people look at me and say, "Oh, the customers know what they want." Oh yeah? Well, let's test this. An enormous amount of investment into the product community in the mobile marketplace. Eventually customers voted: "We like SMS and ringtone downloads." They saw it and they liked it. But if you'd specifically went out and decided that's what you were going to build from the start, the investment would be a fraction of the total product development market in the mobile space. So that underpins the fact that you have to get more propositions into the market faster so customers can choose.

You've set a target of 2008 to pull this off. What challenges do you face as a global carrier in implementing a strategy that ambitious?