Tag: BT

BT slashes 1,300 jobs as outsourcers suffer

Posted on May 11, 2018 by - News

Kitten-KongBT announced it would be slashing 13,000 jobs to save £1.5 billion over the next three years, mostly due to the poor performance of its outsourcing arm.

The restructuring comes after BT’s full-year results revealed its revenue declined one percent year on year during the 12 months ending 31 March 2018 – to £23.7 billion while operating profit was up seven per cent to £3.4 billion.

BT’s results were hampered by its troubled Global Services business which saw revenue decline nine percent to just over £5 billion, with EBITDA dropping 12 percent to £495 million.

BT said that of the 13,000 job cuts around one third would come overseas in the Global Services division.

BT is also to abandon its London HQ in favour of 30 “modern strategic sites”.

BT CEO Gavin Patterson said: “Decisions like this are not easy. We recognise that it is going to affect a lot of people, but ultimately we need to do these things to ensure that we remain a competitive business going forward and that we can benchmark our performance against peer companies.”

BT said that the majority of the redundancies would come from back-end roles and mid-management, adding that simplifying its structure will result in “fewer, bigger, more accountable leadership roles”.

It will, however, recruit around 6,000 new employees to “support network deployment and customer service”.

In Global Services, BT plans to introduce new digital products and focus more on its top global customers, while “significantly lowering costs”.

BT said: “The next phase of BT’s transformation coincides with changes in the telecoms market with exponential growth in data consumption and network capacity requirements and increasing competitive intensity from established companies and new entrants.

“It is critical that BT transforms its operating model to build a lean and agile organisation that delivers sustained improvement in customer experience and productivity.”

It is not the only big outsourcer which has been suffering lately. Capita announced losses of £513 million and other firms are finding it hard to compete against smaller rivals.

Getronics looks to former BT and Colt manager for COO

Posted on May 9, 2018 by - Moving People, News

3565746760001_5488856853001_5488858743001-vsGetronics has named former president of BT’s global customer services Rogier Bronsgeest as its chief operating officer.

Bronsgeest worked at BT for more than six years, leaving in December 2015 to join Colt as chief customer experience officer. He will begin his new role immediately, with Getronics claiming the new hire is “the right man to help the ‘new’ Getronics fulfil its goals and ambitions”.

He said that he would continue down the path chosen in recent years and build on the new Getronics vision, go-to-markets and value propositions,

“I am looking forward to improving our user experience and helping Getronics establish itself as the preferred partner for businesses in transformation”, he said.

Bronsgeest worked more than five years at the IT services firm between 2004 and 2009 as executive vice president of global service delivery and global programme management.

Bronsgeest replaces Thomas Fetten, who left Getronics in December 2017 before joining cybersecurity specialist SecureLink as CEO in March.

There has been much motion at Getronics in the last year. CEO Mark Cook stepped down last August to be replaced by the majority shareholder of its new investor – Bottega InvestCo – Nana Baffour.

Now is the time to make a real killing from the ISDN switch-off

Posted on May 4, 2018 by - News

paulclarke3cxchannelmanager-580x358UK Manager, 3CX, Paul Clarke says that BT’s ISDN switch off is a significant opportunity for the channel.

Clarke claims that the channel can enhance the existing opportunities in light of the proposed changes, as well as the broader opportunities for businesses and how the channel can make use of these.

He said: ” We’re currently on the brink of another such change, with British Telecom steaming ahead with its plan to switch-off of ISDN and PTSN lines in 2025, with consultations about the change said to be starting in the next few weeks. If BT stops selling new ISDN lines in 2020 as expected, the three million ISDN lines still used by businesses in the UK will have to begin exploring IP-based communications. This change presents a great opportunity for the channel, but with the change-over deadlines looming, time is running out to react.”

Clark said that the task facing channel businesses is the same. It did not matter if it was an IP specialist or newcomer taking advantage of the new ground this change provides, or a traditional ISDN service provider adapting to the new IP business model. If the channel does not have a plan for converting ISDN customers to IP, they could be turning their back on vast potential revenue.

“By offering businesses of every size, in every industry, the tools, services and support they need to modernise their communications throughout, this change provides a fantastic opportunity for the channel to reach new customers. Communication has made huge technological leaps since VoIP was first introduced, and the channel should be capable of overcoming any concerns their potential new customers have about the change”, he said.

The UK faces a struggle in guaranteeing high-speed broadband consistently across the nation. This means that businesses in more rural locations might be unwilling to swap their well-established ISDN connection for a less-trusted IP connection, even if the existing connection is slower.

British Telecom isn’t the only company to switch off ISDN and PSTN connections: SwissCom phased out ISDN lines last year in favour of IP based services. SwissCom’s change has highlighted the benefits of IP lines; including lower costs, higher bandwidth and greater flexibility. Significantly, even areas with limited broadband connections are likely to see better speeds than the existing ISDN provides. Switching to IP can open up far more options to channel partners, as well as the business,” Clark said.

Some businesses may not immediately recognise the benefit of the additional services beyond voice that IP allows, offering services including instant messaging, and video, these can provide valuable revenue streams for the channel. The support needed to keep these services operational can also offer a financial opportunity to the channel, as long as it can show how these additional communication strategies can benefit businesses, he said.

This means ensuring businesses understand that working practices are changing, with flexible working meaning anywhere can be an office.

“Instead of communicating over fixed lines, using IP is a great way for businesses adapt to this change, as well as providing simpler, lower-cost communication with potential customers and partners anywhere, at any time, over any channel. By making this clear, businesses are more likely to embrace the opportunity to update their technology and reduce their costs at the same time”, Clark said.

Clark thinks that while it is undeniable that communication is at the heart of modern businesses. The ISDN switch-over may be one of the last chances for the channel to benefit from changing technologies, leading customers through potential challenges and helping them to make the most out of IP. However, time is of the essence and the channel needs to move now before businesses are pushed to make the change before the deadline.

“Guiding customers through this new landscape, for example by offering new forms of communication, could reward the channel handsomely. The alternative is settling for the leftovers come 2025”, Clark added.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Altify signs up for Salesforce Quip

Posted on March 27, 2018 by - News

indexAltify, whose customers include BT, GE and Sage, is using the integrated collaboration platform system Salesforce Quip in a cunning plan to enhance  collaboration and productivity of sales teams worldwide. Automation, AI and chatbots have transformed sales.

Altify is available on the Salesforce App Exchange, is empowering human front-line sales managers, enabling them to identify potential risks on upcoming deals, Deliver coaching notifications, Drive best practices created from centuries’ worth of sales experience.

Altify’s CEO, Anthony Reynolds said that Britain has suffered a steady decline in productivity since the Brexit referendum. Some are looking to technology to improve this. As always, sales teams are particularly focused on productivity and it is their sales productivity which ultimately will help the UK win or lose in the post-Brexit world.

“As seen by the Dropbox, Salesforce integration earlier this month, the lack of collaboration between sales pros using the top-selling Salesforce tool makes closing deals efficiently a bottleneck. To be fair, it is not their fault. Quite simply, salespeople work in silos because data is stored in silos. If only sales teams could access their data as easily as Cambridge Analytica can access Facebook’s, their productivity would soar”,  Reynolds said.

 

BT fined for being too escargot

Posted on March 27, 2017 by - News

Cooked_snailsTop British telco BT has been fined a record £42 million by the regulator, Ofcom,  for failing to install high speed lines for businesses fast enough.

It is likely that BT will have to write out a cheque for £300 million in compensation to customers who suffered from its mega-slowness.

The company was apparently using its terms of its contracts to reduce compensation payments to other providers for failing to deliver Ethernet services on time between January 2013 and December 2014, regulator Ofcom said.

BT’s Chief Executive Gavin Patterson said the company took the matter very seriously, and had put in place measures, controls and people to prevent it happening again.

In other news, Ofcom has revealed new plans which would see consumers who experience poor service automatically compensated, in cash or credit, by their landline or broadband providers.

As part of the scheme, customers who have had to put up with delayed repairs, missed installation or engineer appointments, will be paid up to £30 in compensation, depending on the problem. According to Ofcom, six million landline and broadband customers could receive a total of around £185 million in compensatory payments each year as a result of the policy.

The regulator says every year UK repair technicians failed to show up for 250,000 repair appointments.

BT must legally separate from Openreach

Posted on November 29, 2016 by - News

Divorce Just Ahead SignTelecoms watchdog Ofcom has barked at BT to legally separate from its Openreach division.

For those who came in late Openreach runs the UK’s broadband infrastructure and considerably miffs BT’s rivals including Sky and Talk Talk.

They claim that Openreach charged too much for the use of broadband lines and was unresponsive to their demands. They wanted a full break-up of BT, with Openreach being turned into a separate company.

Now it seems that Ofcom agrees saying that BT had not voluntarily addressed competition concerns Ofcom laid out in July, it said.

Ofcom said it was preparing a formal notification to the European Commission to start the process.

The regulator has resisted calls to split Openreach off entirely.

Ofcom said BT had not gone far enough to address its concerns about BT’s ability to favour its retail business when making investment decisions in Openreach.

It wants Openreach to become a distinct company with its own board, with non-executives and a chair unaffiliated with BT.

Openreach would have a duty to treat all its customers equally, the regulator said.

Cloud suppliers promise not to harm customers

Posted on November 7, 2016 by - News

lightning-cloudThe UK Competition and Markets Authority has managed to get a promise from BT, Dropbox, Google and Mozy that they will not try to screw over cloudy punters with dodgy terms and conditions.

Apparently the four were compelled to take the pledge after the CMA started peering into cloud service providers’ contract terms and tutting that they discriminated against consumers.

After making its pledge, BT had promised that “free accounts will not be terminated due to inactivity during the first 365 days of the contract”. It has also promised to give 90 days’ notice in writing when it wants to zap unused cloud backup accounts. It also “agreed to amend” its terms and conditions, which at present give it the right to unilaterally change prices on a whim.

Dropbox has promised not to kill customers’ accounts without notice. Apparently that right existed in the terms and conditions and no one spotted it.

Google has agreed to “ensure consumers are given an opportunity to remedy their breaches” before terminating their accounts, as well as giving 30 days’ notice of a price increase “or storage plan decrease”.

The search engine outfit will now ensure that consumers can bring legal proceedings in their local courts and under their local laws if it breaks the terms of its own contract

Mozy, which provides Windows and Mac OS X backup services, made much the same promises as BT and Dropbox.

 

Talk-talk wants channel to support “Fix Britain’s Internet”

Posted on September 27, 2016 by - News

essential-talk-talk-51fd8e90e1476TalkTalk is asking its channel partners to support the “Fix Britain’s Internet “campaign which is calling for the privatisation of BT Openreach.

For those who came in late,  the campaign was created by Vodafone, Sky and TalkTalk, and is designed to help consumers and businesses to make their voices heard during Ofcom’s ten week public consultation period. TalkTalk’s wants its channel partners to joined the fight.

Ofcom published its Strategic Review of Digital Communications admiting that major reform was needed. Several months later, the watchdog set out proposals that would not force BT to spin off Openreach, but instead suggested that Openreach should be run as a legally separate company within BT Group, with its own board, and an independent chairman.

However the competing service providers fear this is not enough and want everyone to oppose it. In a statement Talk Talk said:

“Our partners’ have a firsthand experience of Openreach’s poor service provisioning has fueled their desire to support the campaign and encourage more businesses to get in touch with Ofcom before the consultation closes on 4th October 2016.”

 

Watchdog says Openreach must be legally seperate from BT

Posted on July 27, 2016 by - News

dog-on-bed-with-people-no-text-590x388UK telco watchdog Ofcom has growled that Openreach must become a “legally” separate company from BT and have its independent board as seperate drinks cabinet.

In February, Ofcom identified serious failings with BT’s ownership model of Openreach now it has outlined details of how an enhanced structural separation will work.

Ofcom said BT has an incentive to make these decisions in the interests of its own retail businesses, rather than BT’s competitors.

Ofcom iterated that Openreach should be a legally separate company within BT, saying all its directors would be required to make decisions in the interests of all Openreach’s customers. The new board should have a majority of non-executive directors, who should not be affiliated to BT Group in any way but would be both appointed and removed by BT in consultation with Ofcom.

Openreach’s chief exec should be appointed by the Openreach Board, with no direct lines of reporting from Openreach executives to BT Group.

Openreach will also be obliged to consult formally with customers such as Sky and TalkTalk on large-scale investments which is something that BT was not happy to do during its G.Fast roll-out plans.

Sharon White, Ofcom’s Chief Executive, said: “We’re pressing ahead with the biggest shake-up of telecoms in a decade, to make sure the market is delivering the best possible services for people and business across the UK.”

The moves are designed to ensure that Openreach acts more independently from BT Group, and takes decisions for the good of the wider telecoms industry and its customers. “If it cannot achieve this, Ofcom will reconsider whether BT and Openreach should be split into two entirely separate companies, under different ownership,” said the regulator.

Ofcom said BT has notified it of plans to deliver changes to Openreach’s governance, to make it more independent and accountable to its customers. “We welcome BT’s acknowledgement of the need to reform Openreach, and elements of BT’s proposal.

BT sent all its mail to Steve

Posted on April 21, 2016 by - News

btlogoBroadband provider BT redirected its customers’ outgoing emails to the account of one of its business partners for three hours.

The account belonged to Synchronoss Technologies, which  took over the running of BT’s cloud services last month. While BT did not provide details on the reason for the disruption, it appears to be something gone wrong during testing.

It appears that outgoing messages were getting forwarded to stevewebb2@btinternet.com address and that was bouncing email as the mailbox was full. According to Linked in there is a Steve Webb who supports O2 and BT email platforms looking after the mail gateway, the backend servers containing the mailboxes, calendars and address books and other servers in the platform.

“I have supported 28 million email accounts and 80 million emails per day,” if we are right then this guy literally did the job for a few hours this week.

 

BT wins big Boots contract

Posted on March 8, 2016 by - News, Products

boots_1419530bBT has won a big contract to provide the underling infrastructure for Boots as it prepares to push forward with an ‘omni-channel’ strategy.

Boots has contracted BT to overhaul its IT infrastructure in the UK and the rest of Europe as part of a wider digital transformation. It wants to get better at omni-channel retailing, it thinks that is where the money is.

The high street retailer will soon be bringing in more ways for customers to interact with the brand online and in-store. And new voice and communications technologies for staff will also be introduced.

Boots has a lot more network requirements and a lot more bandwidth requirements – with that goes resilience.

“If you become dependent on digital tools in-store, you don’t want those things to be unavailable.”

BT will roll out dedicated fibre Ethernet services and copper-based networks to flagship stores, improve internal systems, and shops will have a “future-ready” network to adapt to new technologies. This should also speed up in-store processing time for pharmacy orders, stock replenishment and booking appointments.

Currently the outfit has a lots of different legacy systems – in data, in data centres, networking and other infrastructure. So the company was after a way to centralise network services in one place, in a way that was better for security and application control.

It is also an early adopter of BT Connect Intelligence IWAN. It’s a managed service that allows for automatic routing and optimisation of network traffic, and the intention is to provide more visibility on applications performance.

Boots tried several contractors but BT came out on top in terms of reliability and for its innovations like IWAN. It was also a good deal money wise.

 

EU gives its cloud to BT, IBM, Accenture and Atos

Posted on February 8, 2016 by - News, Products

Eu-flag-vector-material2The European Commission has announced BT, IBM, Accenture and Atos will get most of the contracts to supply its new cloud services.

Contracts were broken out into three “lots,” covering a private cloud setup, public cloud setup, and platform-as-a-service, for which it will pay $38.5 million.
The whole lot will be platformed by Telecom Italia which is a bit unfortunate. That outfit is under resourced and its mobile arm TIM just adopted the iChing hexagram for “standing still” as its logo.waiting

It is unusual that Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Amazon and none of the other big cloud outfits managed to get their paws on the EU’s clouds.

The Commission said that all the systems will be physically located within the European Union, the Commission noted, “to be compliant with EU data handling requirements” basically it means that the US will not be able to steal it.

According to the announcement, the contract will “enable the Commission to follow the ceaseless pace of today’s technological race.”

The EU hopes that use of cloud services will help it come up with future improvements to how it works, such as using “Big Data.”

The private cloud service will provide computing and storage facilities through a private network link connected to the EC’s data centres, and will be hosted by a single provider. The public cloud infrastructure will be run over the public internet. And the public platform-as-a-service will include both operating systems and database services run over the cloud.

The first cloud services should appear this year.

Councils found outsourcing a burden in 2015

Posted on December 29, 2015 by - News

ukflagLocal authorities in the UK  are starting to find that the outsourcing contracts they signed are saddling them with more costs than they predicted.

Outsourcing was being touted as a way to save money, but it is starting to look like the councils are having to scale down outsourcing operations or abandon them completely. The current belief is now that a move to outsource can be a false economy. Councils are beginning to realise they are quite adept at making savings themselves.

This year Cornwall Council was awarded the right to divorce its outsourcing contract with BT. The council signed a 10-year £160m contract with BT two years ago,. However Cornwall was far from happy and wanted out. So BT sued to keep it in.

The eventual contract with BT was a slimmed down version of the original deal proposed in 2012, which was overturned after councillors put forward a no-confidence vote to the leader of Cornwall Council over the plans.

It was not the only one which is unhappy with its outsourcing contract. Earlier this month, Somerset voted to terminate its 10-year SouthWest One deal with IBM a year early, due to a report finding it had become “increasingly unaffordable”.

Now it seems that other councils are getting less keen about being saddled with outsourcing contracts. Dorset County Council has rejected plans to outsource its IT services, as it was unlikely to be sufficiently flexible in the future.

Looking at the numbers the council decided that it would not get value for money.

This means that outsourcing sales teams hoping to interest councils in big contracts next year will find it a tough sell.

BT makes a play for mobile phone market

Posted on March 25, 2015 by - News

btlogoTelco giant BT is to enter the mainstream smartphone market again this year and will offer 4G services at an aggressive £5 SIM only rate.

But the move is likely to prompt investigation by UK regulators as the number of providers has now sunk to just three companies.

BT is attempting to buy EE but also has spectrum it can use itself. It isn’t yet ready to offer handsets itself, just SIM cards.

BT formerly owned O2, but sold it to Spanish telco Telefonica in 2005.

The company is likely to offer its sports service to people who sign up to its tariff, and that may be attractive to some people.

Paolo Pescatore, a director at CSS isnight, described BT Mobile’s launch as “more aggressive than many anticipated. He said: “BT has made the right decision to offer a range of of simple and transparent packages as part of its return to the consumer mobile market. The £5 SIM only deal for existing BT broadband households is probably the best value 4G SIM only deal in the market.”

He said BT is able to bring something different to the party by offering BT Sport and BT Wi-Fi.

Ofcom draws a super broadband line for BT

Posted on March 19, 2015 by - News

btlogoUK regulator Ofcom said that from the 1st of April, BT will have to maintain a margin between its wholesale and retail superfast broadband that’s enough to allow competition from other providers.

The regulator said that the rules will allow BT to keep its current flexibility to set its own wholesale fibre prices but it must not set those prices in a manner that will stop others from matching its prices and making a profit.

While BT is the biggest retail provider of fibre broadband services, it is forced under regulation to let other operators sell superfast broadband to ordinary people too, using a process dubbed virtual unbundled local access.

Ofcom seems happy enough that BT is, at the moment, allowing other companies to compete in the superfast market but wants to make sure that continues in the future.

What’s triggered Ofcom’s interest is that BT is a new entrant to the sports content market and gives BT Sport free to superfast broadband customers. The regulator wants to make sure that it doesn’t have an unfair advantage over the competition.

The number of people using superfast broadband in the UK is now 3.7 million, with providers offering speeds of up to 76Mbit/s. The industry eventually wants to offer speeds of up to 1 Gbit/s in the future.