BT innovates product portfolio to help businesses and government organisations succeed in the current economy and the future

Virtual Data Centre optimises “cloud computing” offering new ways of pricing and delivering IT services

BT today revealed that it will be launching its new Virtual Data Centre (VDC) service in the coming months, aimed at helping large business and public sector organisations succeed in the current economy and prepare for the future. It provides a dynamic and virtualised infrastructure platform that enables them to consume their IT and networking infrastructure as a service and forms the base for future cloud services.

The BT VDC, showcased by BT today at the Handelsblatt Telecommunications Market Europe conference in Dusseldorf, Germany, marks the first of several networked IT product and service innovations and updates to be announced by BT Global Services this year. BT’s investment has been focused on supporting portfolio innovations in voice/unified communications, network services, security, mobility, data centres and contact centres infrastructure.

BT Virtual Data Centre service will, uniquely in the market, be rolled-out across datacentres in multiple countries in EMEA and this will enable BT to provide true enterprise class services. The second key differentiator with competitors is that BT offers servers, storage, networks and security that is orchestrated and automatically provisioned through its online portal. Customers can change the infrastructure easily in real-time throughout the duration of the contract through the portal.

BT customers will also be able to virtualise many of their networking and IT needs to the required service levels. By using BT’s enterprise class infrastructure, BT VDC delivers to large organisations the benefits of enterprise class “cloud computing” to customers at a significant saving against a standard hosted infrastructure deployment.

“Any Infrastructure as a Service offering that can provide a platform where organisations can scale their computing, network, and storage requirements in real time, according to their needs, will have obvious appeal.” said Roy Illsley, Senior Research Analyst at research company Butler Group.

As part of the BT VDC offering, customers will be able to purchase virtualised components and access them over a pre-provisioned infrastructure. Virtual server, storage, security and networking capabilities will be available, automated and orchestrated through an online portal and supported by a single service desk.

Hanif Lalani, Chief Executive of BT Global Services, said: “In today’s turbulent, global economy companies need flexible, efficient, and secure networked IT services to sharpen their competitive edge, innovate how they do business and get to market first.

“The launch of BT VDC services is just one example of innovation in of our Global Services product portfolio, illustrating that BT continues to invest in and innovate our capabilities to ensure customers have the right services to run their business in 2009. BT VDC will deliver a new and enhanced customer experience. Having the click-to-build and buy facility will give them flexibility and ease of provisioning. Deployment times will also be reduced from months to weeks resulting in further cost savings and efficiencies.” he added.

“BT is one of the very first movers in Europe with its infrastructure as a service offer and the only global provider that will be deploying this service across a vast network of data centres both in the UK and Europe,” said Dustin Kehoe, Principal Analyst, Current Analysis. “Other differentiators for BT include a strong central platform allowing customers to provision services on the fly and a solid professional services organisation to support customers with higher end requirements.”

Luis Alvarez, President, EMEA, BT Global Services, speaking today at the Handelsblatt Telecommunications Market Europe conference in Dusseldorf, Germany, said: “BT’s vision is to become a leading infrastructure as a service provider. BT VDC has all of the components to enable us to realise that vision including virtual computing, storage, security and networks orchestrated and automatically provided via our online portal. Our investment in this innovative service means that we differentiate ourselves from simple server virtualisation offering.”

Further Innovations to BT Global Services’ Product Portfolio
BT VDC is just one of a number of new product innovations that will be announced by BT Global Services this year, focused on helping business customers and government organisations achieve competitive edge this year.

BT Global Services’ product offerings are available as managed services and have been improved to help businesses attain cost leadership and create more value for their own customers. BT’s portfolio of products and services offers customers the capabilities to rapidly, securely and efficiently deploy networked IT services to help them survive in the current climate and seize opportunities when the economy revitalises.

BT will be making a series of announcements throughout this year about its continued investment and innovation in products and services including:

* BT Onevoice is a market leading global voice solution that delivers operational and cost benefits today, and creates a robust roadmap approach to global Unified Communications and Collaboration (UCC). BT has developed a range of services, offering advances in features, access and the very latest voice technology. BT Onevoice is a highly flexible, scalable and reliable package, with fully-featured digital telephony and reduced-rate mobile calls, that is able to combine traditional and IP voice environments seamlessly across the globe.
* BT Unite, new to the market this year, delivers on the promise of UCC through converged voice and data services. BT Unite features a range of packages that bring together the best and most-requested UCC elements from Cisco, Microsoft and IBM and delivers a fully integrated solution. BT was the first to offer a fully integrated approach to UCC, and with our extensive Professional Services team, supported by fully accredited engineers, BT’s customers can enjoy all the benefits of unified communications with approved and tested solutions that address all the interoperability and integration challenges.
* BT MobileXpress enables mobile and remote employees to access corporate networks and applications securely and reliably via fixed or wireless connections, making them accessible and productive wherever they are. During 2009 we are evolving BT MobileXpress’ security and remote management capabilities. We will be extending our global consultancy services for flexible working and mobile security, enabling managed solutions such as the award-winning Laptop Protection, a service which provides customers the ability to ‘kill’ the data held on the machine if security is compromised.
* BT Unified Video utilises the very latest video conferencing technologies that ensures customers can continue to have all important face-to-face interaction in meetings, while cutting down on costs associated with travel. BT is now the number one video conferencing provider in the world and is ideally placed to take advantage of analysts’ predictions that telepresence will be the strongest growth area in the video market in 2009. BT’s conferencing solutions offer unique levels of service, underpinned by world class infrastructure.
* BT Carbon Impact Assessment measures a customer’s carbon footprint and energy consumption, before outlining the sustainable practices and communication technologies that can help them lower emissions, reduce costs and increase efficiency. BT has tried and tested the Carbon Impact Assessment (CIA) and was able to help one customer save an estimated £30 million over five years. The CIA offers serious business benefit by identifying the maximum possible opportunity for cost savings, cost avoidance, and carbon reduction.
* BT Intelligent Networks is a family of services which includes BT’s recently launched best-in-class BT Intelligent Virtual Private Network (BTiVPN), BT Etherflow and Wide Area Network Optimisation technologies which help customers prioritise mission-critical data traffic, optimise business application performance and drive efficiencies. BT’s recently launched BTiVPN allows global organisations to better manage and improve the performance of their IT network and business applications, and reduce technical and operational costs.
* BT Managed Security Services deliver flexible, cost-effective and comprehensive end-to-end security, that protects customers’ infrastructure from ever-evolving threats and enables compliance with legal and regulatory requirements. We monitor over 335,000 devices, for almost 1000 MSSP customers around the world and provide over 300 million secure connections per day in over 1,000 cities across 70 countries. BT is investing in a new global, harmonised MSS platform which further improves the service we deliver to our customers.
* BT Next Generation Contact Centres (NGCC) provides fully hosted contact centre capability for customers deploying contact centre services all around the world. This means that organisations can benefit from world class contact centre features without the need to deploy technology at the location, enabling rapid roll out of agents and pricing on a pay as you go basis that allows extra agents to be added and then removed to staff to peak periods. For 2009, NGCC includes enhanced geographic resilience, providing 99.99 per cent availability and per minute pricing.