The CEO of BT Group’s carved out International unit Bas Burger laid out an ambition to bolster its non-UK enterprise business by focusing on a pair of cloud-centric products he believes can help multinationals navigate current market trends and conditions.
In a statement outlining his intent for the organisation, which formally launched today (2 June), former BT Business boss Burger predicted there would be a shift away from fragmented international enterprise networks towards modern platforms and fewer providers.
“We believe international networks will gravitate towards fewer, larger, telco platforms able to manage the demand generated by increased cloud and AI services,” he said, declaring the industry had reached a “pivotal moment”.
The executive added there was “an opportunity to move away from fragmented legacy international networks to a platform designed with the reality of AI, cyber and cloud at its core”.
Discussing its own offering to multinationals, Burger explained its platforms were designed to “reflect the trends we see in customer traffic crossing our networks” including data flows to and between cloud providers and the emergence of hybrid cloud.
Its challenge in the segment centres on products promoted as scalable and suitable for the era of multi-cloud and AI: Global Voice and Global Fabric.
The former combines Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) voice and a cloud focus meaning it was “perfectly poised to unlock the full potential of integrating voice with AI”, the executive said.
Global Fabric is a network-as-a-service platform which provides the means of choosing secure connectivity methods including cloud destinations “data goes to and the route it takes along the way”.
This quality, Burger stated, aided navigation of an “increasingly complex international regulatory environment.”
The formation of BT International comes during a focus by BT Group CEO Allison Kirkby to focus squarely on the UK market and follows intense media speculation on the future of its remaining assets elsewhere.
On announcing the switch of its Business CEO earlier this year BT described Burger’s change in role as allowing him to “devote all of his time to the optimisation of BT’s international operations and explore options for the unit”.