BT “Cloud of Clouds” to empower global collaboration

BT customers to benefit from increased choice and better user experience through easier integration of legacy and cloud-based collaboration platforms from multiple vendors

BT today announced the global availability of three new cloud-based solutions that enable customers to easily integrate collaboration tools and services from disparate technology platforms and different vendors. Freedom of choice, security and great user experience deliver the promise of “Cloud of Clouds” to multi-vendor unified communications and collaboration environments.

With One Cloud video, BT addresses the shift of video collaboration from the conference room to multi-vendor environments using office desktops, home laptops and mobile devices. To help customers prevent the traps of video islands that are unable to interconnect between them and to the wider world, BT is now making it easy to schedule and join a video conference across different platforms and different devices. One Cloud video is launched globally and allows user-friendly video conferencing either through MeetMe video for existing BT MeetMe, Microsoft and mixed video estate customers, or through Cisco Collaboration Meeting Rooms (CMR) for customers who use WebEx.

For One Cloud Microsoft customers, BT is now bringing together the familiar experience of Skype with the security, compliance, and control of Microsoft Lync in a new Skype for Business proposition. The new capability is launched globally and allows BT One Cloud Microsoft customers to very easily engage into productive conferencing sessions with anyone –including customers or partners outside their organisations.

For One Cloud Cisco customers, BT addresses the needs of many organisations with past investments in incompatible voice and desktop technologies. BT is now making it possible for those customers to bridge the gaps and add advanced collaboration services, such as BT MeetMe with Dolby voice, Cisco WebEx and Cisco Collaboration Meeting Rooms to their One Cloud Cisco collaborate licence as and when they need them. The new capability is launched globally.

The new cloud offers build on BT’s expertise in bringing together technology platforms that are usually seen as incompatible. The BT Advise professional services team design the processes and technology services needed by customers to make all these technologies work seamlessly together, delivering the fullest promise of unified communications in the most complex environments.

Andrew Small, vice-president for unified communications and customer relationship management at BT Global Services, said: “Our customers want choice, security, a great user experience and a single way of managing their options. But they do not want the complexity. For that, integration is the key. The easy integration of a very diverse range of collaboration services and tools, disparate platforms and multiple devices across fixed and mobile communications is a key building block of our broader ‘Cloud of Clouds’ technology vision. Our customers are counting on us to bring all that together in the cloud, along with the network performance required by high definition videoconferencing wherever it is required, and the knowledge of how to manage and integrate existing investments securely.”

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BT’s technology vision: the Cloud of Clouds

The cloud is creating choices that never existed before. Through understanding those choices comes the confidence and the ability to harness change and do things that matter: get to market and innovate faster, keep costs down, and keep customers happy.

BT’s Cloud of Clouds vision is about allowing customers to connect easily and securely to the applications and data they need, regardless of where they’re hosted and where they are based.

As a cloud services integrator, we help customers move confidently and successfully along their cloud journey whilst minimising the complexity, risk and cost; to give them a choice of roadmaps that work for their organisation, in a way that will deliver the results they need.

We manage the whole process from network to cloud, we deal with third parties, deliver performance and security and simplify pricing, all under a single Service Level Agreement.