BT International today announced the launch of UC Edge, a new managed service that gives multinational organisations’ CIOs a simpler, more flexible solution to manage their rapidly evolving AI-powered workplace collaboration strategies.

Many multinational organisations rely on a patchwork of collaboration solutions inherited through mergers and acquisitions or selected to meet different regional business needs, including sovereignty — be that data sovereignty, operational sovereignty or technical sovereignty. This mix of technologies can slow down transformation, increase costs and leave IT teams wrestling with complex, overlapping systems.

Now live, with initial customer deployments in highly regulated industries, UC Edge cuts through all of that. It lets organisations add or change AI-powered collaboration solutions and platforms quickly without restarting procurement or rebuilding compliant voice services.

An expansion of BT International’s Global Voice platform, it brings voice, collaboration and number management into one, vendor agnostic service. It works seamlessly across collaboration platforms, contact centre solutions and SIP services. IT teams can tailor the experience for each user, team or country while managing all their collaboration services through a single model.

Built as a single global communication layer, UC Edge’s intelligent voice routing automatically directs calls to the correct platform — no manual number alignment, no portal changes, no routing requests. IT teams can also move users between platforms with zero disruption and far less operational effort.

Denise Lund, IDC Research vice president worldwide UC&C and telecom, said: “As multinational organisations modernise their communications, they increasingly demand the flexibility to adopt best-of-breed and vendor-agnostic collaboration solutions that align with diverse business and regulatory needs. BT International’s UC Edge empowers enterprises to seamlessly integrate and manage multiple platforms, reducing complexity while enabling choice and agility.”

Matt Swinden, managing director of strategy & product at BT International, said: “Many multinationals are juggling legacy collaboration platforms, regional needs or simple user preference. With UC Edge, customers get one contract, one commercial model and one global product delivered seamlessly — giving them the freedom to use the platforms they want without the integration burden. So, when users ask: ‘Can we talk?’ the answer will always be ‘Yes!’”

ENDS

Notes to editors

BT International’s Global Voice platform
BT International’s Global Voice platform carries more than 16 billion calls a year across 70+ countries, integrating with leading collaboration solutions. As a SIP‑powered, cloud-first platform, it provides a strong foundation for future voice-and-AI innovations.

Key features of UC Edge

• One global product for all voice and collaboration services — reduce vendor sprawl and hidden costs with one partner, one contract and one global commercial model
• Enable sovereignty, compliance and regulatory alignment across every market without having to manage it market-by-market
• Strengthen resilience and business continuity with a globally consistent voice layer
• Modernise without lock in, supporting multi-vendor environments and protects for future change
• Bring new sites and users online in minutes, not months
• Learns and routes new numbers automatically through intelligent routing

Sovereignty

Data sovereignty ensures data is governed by the laws of the jurisdiction in which it was generated, with clarity over where it is stored and processed. Operational sovereignty relates to how services are run, including who operates them, from where, and under what governance and accreditation. Technical sovereignty is about long-term control and resilience, including the ability to operate, adapt and remain secure without undue dependency.

It comes as our customers face unprecedented disruption across their markets driven by geopolitics, regulation and technology — with AI catalysing change faster than ever. We have designed BT International specifically to help our customers meet these challenges head on and anticipate future opportunities to thrive.

The way we do this centres on two highly scalable telco platforms designed for the age of multi-cloud and AI: Global Voice and Global Fabric, with security built in by design. We’ve channelled our investments into these cloud-centric global platforms and concentrated our expert teams where customers need them most.

From asset-light to platform-rich

We have evolved our ‘asset-light’ strategy for several years, designing our platforms to reflect the trends we see in customer traffic crossing our networks — from data flows to and between the big cloud providers to the emergence of hybrid cloud as a preferred model for many businesses. We see that AI has unpredictable impacts on our customers’ networks — from the lumpy, bulky training workloads of large language models (LLMs) powering GenAI to the low latency demands of conversational AI and augmented reality. These trends are set against the backdrop of a rapidly evolving cyber security threat landscape and a fast-moving regulatory environment.

Telecoms gets its voice back

Our Global Voice platform enables businesses, governments and the people they engage with to communicate with each other effortlessly. We’re already world leading in the global voice services market, managing over 16 billion calls to customer call centres in over 70 countries every year. We’ve migrated these services onto a new SIP-powered, cloud focussed platform enabling voice to be carried across data networks. SIP has been around for a while but the fact that Global Managed Voice is both SIP-powered and cloud-focused means that it’s perfectly poised to unlock the full potential of integrating voice with AI.  

Indeed, Gartner predicts that 30 per cent of Fortune 500 companies will offer customer service through only a single, AI-enabled channel by 2028. I believe our Global Voice platform is strongly positioned to enable this, backed by our experts who have delivered over 5,000 contact centres to over 2,000 customers around the world.

Wrapping the world in Global Fabric

Next, we have Global Fabric, our brand-new, AI-ready, cloud-centric network-as-a-service (NaaS) platform. This offers customers instant, secure and resilient connectivity to practically every app or digital service they want, including the world’s top cloud and software-as-a-service  (SaaS) providers. It launched to live customer traffic earlier this year and it is the platform that will help us achieve our goal to be the world’s number one provider of secure multi-cloud connectivity.

Global Fabric could have hardly arrived at a better time. We were one of the first telcos off the starting blocks with a truly greenfield international platform to eliminate the drag that the previous generation of networks had on customer innovation. With traditional networks, setting up or making changes to connectivity for a new or existing app, including AI, could take days or weeks. With Global Fabric, it happens in an instant.

Now think of the increasingly complex international regulatory environment. Technology and data have become geopolitical pawns. That means customers must double down on sovereignty, ensuring the right data stays within the right jurisdiction while enabling them to unlock its value to the business. With Global Fabric, customers can choose both the cloud destinations their data goes to and the route it takes along the way. This means regulated data never leaves the designated national borders and helps customers stay compliant.

Sharing a platform for success

Looking to the future of our industry, we believe international networks will gravitate towards fewer, larger, telco platforms able to manage the demand generated by increased cloud and AI services. We invite other service providers to work with BT International, as we build out our ecosystem of partners, including our recently announced partnership with Google Cloud, and scale fast so we can, as an industry, offer the best value to customers across the globe. 

We’re at a pivotal moment as an industry. It is 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, reflecting customers’ expectations of speed, security, sustainability, sovereignty and naturally the skills to support future growth and prosperity.