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!’”

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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.

BT  and 22nd Century Technologies, Inc. (TSCTI) today announced completion of the sale of BT Federal Inc., BT’s US government contracting subsidiary, to TSCTI.  BT Federal will now operate as 22nd Century Networks, a wholly owned subsidiary of TSCTI. 

The transaction expands TSCTI’s managed network services capabilities, including coverage across all 50 states, with BT Federal’s deep telecommunications and networking expertise. The new 22^nd Century Networks unit delivers fully integrated solutions “from enterprise to edge” under a single, interoperable platform – enabling organisations to modernise legacy environments, integrate across domains, and execute missions securely. 

For BT, this sale marks another milestone as it simplifies its portfolio and pursues a more UK-focused strategy. It also allows BT International, now a standalone unit, to build on its unique position in the market as it serves the needs of multinational customers and aims to become a global leader in secure multi-cloud connectivity. BT International will continue to have a strong presence in the US with regional offices and employees based in New York, Dallas and Reston. 

“This marks a transformational moment for our company and the missions we serve – strengthening our ability to deliver future-ready, cyber-secure network solutions our government partners rely on,” said Anil Sharma, Chief Executive Officer of 22nd Century Technologies.  

“With 22nd Century Networks, we are advancing digital modernisation while also securing the network layer that underpins our nation’s most critical operations across the Department of War, Department of Justice and Department of State. By delivering secure, sovereign infrastructure engineered for Zero Trust, interoperability and mission continuity in any environment, we are deepening our commitment to protecting the people, systems, and missions that keep our nation safe.” 

“This acquisition is a growth catalyst for us, our customers, and the agencies we have yet to serve,” said Satvinder Singh, President of 22nd Century Technologies. “The expansion of solutions and reach allows us to bring more innovation and reliability to a wider set of federal missions that depend on secure, high-performance network infrastructure.” 

Bas Burger, CEO of BT International, said: “Today’s announcement is another milestone in delivering on our strategy to focus our international business on what it does best: providing secure multi-cloud connectivity to large organisations globally. Our BT Federal unit, which has been a leading provider of services to US federal agencies, will enter a new era with 22nd Century Technologies. We are confident that 22^nd Century Technologies will continue to build on the excellence and commitment of BT Federal to the US government sector.” 

Both organisations are committed to ensuring a seamless transition for employees, customers and partners, with no immediate changes to ongoing operations. 

The transaction was cleared by the US Federal Communications Commission. 

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About 22nd Century Technologies, Inc. (TSCTI) 

22nd Century Technologies, Inc. (TSCTI), founded in 1997, is a public-sector IT systems integrator with more than 6,000 professionals supporting over 500 contracts across DoD, federal civilian, state, and local agencies. With AI and innovation at its core, TSCTI delivers mission-critical solutions in Digital Transformation, Cloud Enablement, Cybersecurity, IT Infrastructure, and Enterprise Modernization. Learn more at www.tscti.com.  

The transaction, first announced on 23 December 2024, and cleared by the Irish Competition and Consumer Protection Commission in August this year, reflects BT’s asset-light strategy internationally and, through partnering with globally scaled organisations, provides for a much more commercially scalable and flexible model.

Bas Burger, CEO of BT International, said: “We are delighted to conclude this successful transaction which represents the next step in our strategy to become a more agile and focused business. We look forward to our continued partnership with Equinix not only in Ireland, but globally.” 

Following the completion of this transaction and an earlier divestment of the Irish wholesale and enterprise business unit in September, BT continues to maintain a strong presence in Ireland with over 300 colleagues serving multinational companies and large organisations. This team will also continue delivering the Emergency Call Answering Service. In Dublin, BT also employs over 100 experts in its global procurement unit, BT Sourced.  

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.

When I talk to BT’s multinational customers, they say it’s the end of the road for legacy networks. Like motorists 100 years ago, they realise that slow is the new down.

The invention of the automobile was transformational. Mass-produced, affordable cars expanded people’s horizons and created new opportunities for business. As Carl Benz’s “Motorwagen” evolved into modern-day cars, performance outstripped the ability of roads to carry them. For the car to reach its full potential, new infrastructure was needed. Autobahns, interstate highways and motorways became the transportation backbone of the modern world.

A similar story is being written today, but instead of physical items like you and me, it’s about transporting AI workloads in the digital world — from locations such as Google Cloud data-centres all the way to users and devices, wherever they may be.

A rear-view mirror

Most businesses still use networks built for a previous generation of IT, where users sat in offices and accessed apps and data stored in their own data-centre. Traffic was predictable and connectivity specified at the start of a fixed-term contract. Few changes were needed, and those that were took days or weeks to make.

AI is changing that. AI traffic is unpredictable. For example, training large language models (LLMs) can cause surges in bandwidth demand, congesting inflexible networks. This impacts not just AI performance, but that of other apps too. Moreover, AI workloads can be split between many users in different places. The app itself may be hosted across multiple clouds.

AI-ready performance

At BT, we pride ourselves on delivering rock-solid foundations for our customers’ digital business. We understand AI demands and are building a brand-new network-as-a-service (NaaS) platform designed specifically to meet its needs.

Called Global Fabric, it offers multinational customers connectivity on demand to a full choice of third-party cloud, AI and SaaS providers. They can choose routes, types of connectivity (eg Internet, Ethernet, IP-VPN), scale, locations and services to connect to, all in an instant with the flexibility to make changes at any time. With Global Fabric, we want AI to run best on BT wherever customers are, wherever the data is. That’s a huge ambition and demands extraordinary scale. No single network provider can do this on their own.

That’s why we’re deepening our partnership with Google Cloud. We’re combining the power of Global Fabric with Cloud WAN, Google Cloud’s fully managed, reliable and secure enterprise WAN backbone that leverages the planet-scale Google network to optimise AI performance and cost.

Together, Global Fabric and Google’s Cloud WAN deliver:

• An extensive network
• A network engineered for speed
• One of the most resilient networks
• And the best outcomes for our customers.

To do this, we’re pre-integrating Cloud WAN’s low-latency subsea optical links into Global Fabric. Customers will have a wide selection of high-speed, reliable routes for their digital workloads, all available at the click of a button on Global Fabric’s web portal. They’ll be able to create fully modern, high-performance, secure and resilient flexible networks for their business — meaning they can put their foot to the floor with their AI plans.

Our partnership will also see BT offering customers Google Cloud Partner Interconnect via Global Fabric in 50 of the world’s top cloud locations, growing to 70 by 2026. This will give customers instant connectivity into Google Cloud, with a 99.99 per cent reliability service level agreement (SLA) backed by BT and Google Cloud.

BT will continue to deepen its collaboration with Google Cloud to ensure reliable, direct, and the fastest low-latency access to Google and Google Cloud services across BT’s network.

For customers on their AI journey, our partnership with Google Cloud offers a high-speed route to success. Traffic restrictions are being lifted. A brand new hyperscale highway awaits.

BT and Equinix today announced an expansion of their partnership to help multinational organisations transform interconnectivity across their digital value chain. The move will help customers boost innovation and accelerate business outcomes.

BT’s AI-ready, Global Fabric network-as-a-service (NaaS) platform is now deployed in over 30 Equinix data-centres, growing to over 40 in the next year. This will span the world’s top 30 business locations covering 95 per cent of the world’s cloud interconnection traffic.

It will add to Global Fabric’s international footprint, which BT believes will be one of the largest of any NaaS platform. When fully built-out, Global Fabric will be available to customers internationally via 140 points-of-presence (PoPs) hosted in the world’s top cloud locations across 40 countries. It will offer 74 per cent direct coverage of hyperscaler clouds and pre-provisioned high-bandwidth connectivity to over 700 data-centres.

Global Fabric connects multinational organisations securely, flexibly and reliably. It transforms the ease at which they can deploy and scale interconnectivity with third parties such as customers and suppliers across their full digital value chain.

It provides visibility and control of both access and core networks. This allows organisations to achieve the best end-to-end network performance for their workloads, from users and devices in offices, factories and other operational sites, to the multi-cloud core, which interconnects apps and digital services such as AI. It is built on a fully resilient architecture and offered with a range of management options. With legacy networks, setting up or changing connectivity could take weeks. With Global Fabric, it happens in an instant.

Equinix’s global platform interconnects multiple clouds hosting the apps, solutions and marketplaces underpinning the digital economy. It provides access to approximately 2,000 network services, approximately 3,000 cloud and IT services, over 400 content and digital media services, and more than 4,800 enterprises.

The agreement expands BT’s ability to offer its customers a comprehensive choice of the best locations for their business to digitally interconnect with partners, suppliers, customers and other stakeholders across their full value chain.

It builds on BT Group’s quantum secure communications relationship with Equinix following the joint achievement of the UK’s first data centre to data centre connection using the technology.

According to Equinix’s Global Interconnection Index, digital ecosystems are growing exponentially. Eighty per cent of business-to-business sales interactions are expected to occur in digital channels by the end of 2025. By integrating industry value chains, leading businesses are innovating at a rate 25 per cent higher than their peers.

Arun Dev, Global Interconnections, Equinix, said: “Our partnership enables BT to offer its customers interconnectivity with the full Equinix global digital ecosystem of cloud and IT services, as well as hundreds of content and digital media services, and over 4,800 enterprises hosted at our datacentres globally.” 

​Matt Swinden, director, digital connectivity, Business, BT, said: "The BT-Equinix partnership is a terrific example of our strategy to build the strongest digital foundations for our customers. Global Fabric combined with Equinix’s global ecosystem of infrastructure, cloud and digital service widens the choice we offer to customers of the best locations to interconnect their full business value chain. It will help make trading, partnering and operating a multinational business, better on BT.” 

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About Equinix

Equinix (Nasdaq: EQIX) is the world's digital infrastructure company^®. Digital leaders harness Equinix's trusted platform to bring together and interconnect foundational infrastructure at software speed. Equinix enables organizations to access all the right places, partners and possibilities to scale with agility, speed the launch of digital services, deliver world-class experiences and multiply their value, while supporting their sustainability goals.

Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from expectations discussed in such forward-looking statements. Factors that might cause such differences include, but are not limited to, risks to our business and operating results related to the current inflationary environment; foreign currency exchange rate fluctuations; stock price fluctuations; increased costs to procure power and the general volatility in the global energy market; the challenges of acquiring, operating and constructing IBX^® and xScale^® data centers and developing, deploying and delivering Equinix products and solutions; unanticipated costs or difficulties relating to the integration of companies we have acquired or will acquire into Equinix; a failure to receive significant revenues from customers in recently built out or acquired data centers; failure to complete any financing arrangements contemplated from time to time; competition from existing and new competitors; the ability to generate sufficient cash flow or otherwise obtain funds to repay new or outstanding indebtedness; the loss or decline in business from our key customers; risks related to our taxation as a REIT; risks related to regulatory inquiries or litigation and other risks described from time to time in Equinix filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In particular, see recent and upcoming Equinix quarterly and annual reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, copies of which are available upon request from Equinix. Equinix does not assume any obligation to update the forward-looking information contained in this press release.

BT today announced it has switched on Global Fabric, its new, transformative, network-as-a-service (NaaS) platform and has been carrying out extensive live testing over the past two months. The first Global Fabric services will launch in early 2025.

Global Fabric will make it easier and quicker for businesses to securely connect employees, customers and devices to apps and digital services — including artificial intelligence (AI) — that are hosted across multiple clouds.

Customers will benefit from scalable, secure, high-capacity and resilient connectivity, ready to meet the growing and complex demands of breakthrough AI technologies. Global Fabric’s flexibility will be unprecedented. With legacy networks, setting up or making changes to connectivity services can take weeks. With Global Fabric, it happens in an instant, helping businesses manage unpredictable, AI-driven spikes in data traffic.

BT has already installed Global Fabric ‘points of presence’ (PoPs) in over 45 of the world’s major cloud data centres with the number increasing to 140. This offers customers a choice of locations from which to access Global Fabric services to suit their operational, market and regulatory needs. 

Customers that do not have network connections into the cloud data centres hosting Global Fabric PoPs will be able to order new links from BT, ensuring they are ready for the launch of live services in early 2025. 

BT is also rolling out a demo of Global Fabric’s digital management portal. By November, this will allow customers’ IT teams to learn how to set up and optimise their multi-cloud network configurations and experiment with application programmable interfaces (APIs). APIs will help customers integrate Global Fabric connectivity into other digital business platforms and apps to boost innovation and growth.  

“BT’s Global Fabric will help customers hit the cloud running,” said Colin Bannon, chief technology officer, BT Business. “It will give them a choice of the world’s best cloud locations to interconnect with their customers, partners and suppliers, making them easier to do business with not just today but tomorrow too. With the achievement of our latest Global Fabric delivery milestones, we take another step closer to a new age of AI-ready, digital interconnectivity.”

ENDS

Connecting to Global Fabric PoPs

Global Fabric’s core network hardware is installed in the world’s major carrier neutral facilities (CNFs) — large datacentres where cloud providers, software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies and network operators provide access to their services.

Global Fabric hardware locations are known as ‘points of presence’ (PoPs). BT makes it easy for customers to connect their sites to their business partners, and to their applications and workloads hosted in the multi-cloud, using our PoPs as global connectivity gateways.

BT today announced it is rolling out its transformational Global Fabric network-as-a-service (NaaS) in strategic Digital Realty carrier neutral facilities (CNFs) around the world. This will enable customers to unlock the full value of their data by making it easier for employees to access it securely and compliantly across the business. It will provide IT leaders with instant, centralised control of connectivity for the best performance and user experience, reduce total costs and help ensure compliance.

Global Fabric is BT’s brand-new NaaS with a footprint spanning the world’s top cloud locations. It is designed to be flexible, scalable and resilient, and offer near-instant control with a choice of connectivity on a pay-as-you-use basis.

Digital Realty operates over 300 CNFs across six continents, in more than 25 countries and over 50 metros. These bring together the world’s leading cloud and software-as-a-service providers in a single location to offer customers a data-centre platform that can act as a digital hub for their business, bringing together technology and data to create the intelligence that drives their digital transformation.

By offering Global Fabric connectivity within and between CNFs, the partners will enable customers to choose and instantly create the right type of connections for their applications and data and layer on security services to make it easier to share across the business. This includes choosing the routes workloads take as they cross the network to give the best user experience to employees wherever they are.

With this control, customers can achieve the best applications performance and costs while addressing growing cyber security threats and future regulations on data in transit. It builds on BT’s existing ability to offer customers Digital Realty hosting and co-location services, which will be available through the Global Fabric marketplace.

Harm Joosse, Global Head of Strategy & Business Development, Service Providers, Digital Realty, said: “By integrating into Digital Realty’s global data centre platform, PlatformDIGITAL®, customers address data gravity challenges by bringing users and clouds to the data with BT’s Global Fabric connectivity, controls, and policy management.

Joosse continued: “BT’s innovative network-as-a-service solution, combined with Digital Realty’s orchestration platform, ServiceFabric™, empowers enterprises with on-demand, personalized experiences, ultimately revolutionizing the way networks are used and managed.”

Colin Bannon, CTO, Business, BT, said: “Businesses deploying cloud services locally benefit from proximity to customers and suppliers. For large organisations, more value can be unlocked if local data can be brought together centrally in a secure and compliant way to create new insights. With data volumes surging, CIOs need greater control of data flows. The combination of Global Fabric and Digital Realty can help customers unlock value from data by stopping local data hubs becoming digital black holes.”

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About Digital Realty

Digital Realty brings companies and data together by delivering the full spectrum of data center, colocation and interconnection solutions. PlatformDIGITAL®, the company’s global data center platform, provides customers with a secure data meeting place and a proven Pervasive Datacenter Architecture (PDx®) solution methodology for powering innovation and efficiently managing Data Gravity challenges. Digital Realty gives its customers access to the connected data communities that matter to them with a global data center footprint of 300+ facilities in 50+ metros across 25+ countries on six continents. To learn more about Digital Realty, please visit digitalrealty.com or follow us on LinkedIn and X.

BT today announced a brand-new international network, enabling business customers to innovate at pace. The new network connects the multiple clouds businesses use for their applications and data with users, such as customers and employees, and will allow them to take advantage of the new wave of digital automation and AI.

Global Fabric, as the new network will be known, represents a generational shift in technology, based on a network-as-a-service (NaaS) technical and commercial model. Like the cloud itself, it is designed to be flexible, scalable and resilient both in the quality of connectivity and the convenience of pay-as-you-use. By combining the power of cloud and networks, customers can optimise application performance, user experience and cost.

They will be able to choose the right type of connectivity for their applications and workloads and proactively manage the routes these take as they move across the network. With this control, customers can achieve the best applications performance, manage costs and address growing regulatory requirements for data in transit.

The new high-capacity, fully programmable network is built with state-of-the-art equipment offering improvements in efficiency, sustainability and resilience. BT estimates that when fully rolled out, Global Fabric will use 79 per cent less electricity than its current global networks (see Notes to editors). This means customers on the new network will be able to reduce their Scope 3 carbon emissions.

Its digital orchestration and e-commerce-like interface enable customers to “shop” for connectivity. It will be pre-integrated with more than 630 digital service providers and over 700 datacentres. This covers the world’s largest public cloud providers, private clouds, network, software-as-a-service (SaaS), and secure access service edge (SASE) solutions — all available at the click of a button.

Jan Hein Bakkers, Senior Research Director, IDC, said: “Organisations realise that the network is a critical foundation for their digital-first and cloud-centric strategies. With the launch of Global Fabric, BT addresses their need to transform their networks. IDC research shows that organisations should adopt a secure and sustainable platform that provides the flexibility, manageability, scalability, and cost effectiveness that can support the right end-user experience for each application. Communications service providers that can deliver performant connectivity solutions with these attributes will be well placed to succeed.”

Chris Sharp, Chief Technology Officer, Digital Realty, said: “Global Fabric is a great example of how service providers should be innovating and will offer enterprises new options for connecting to Digital Realty, the world’s largest data centre platform. By building a cloud-centric network and locating its PoPs inside our world-leading carrier neutral facilities (CNFs), BT will be able to offer its customers terrific speeds with low latency while helping them minimise their environmental impact.”

Brenden Rawle, Senior Director Business Development EMEA at Equinix said: "We welcome BT’s launch of Global Fabric, which builds on its Connected Cloud Edge solution launched with Equinix last year. We enjoy a great partnership with BT and look forward to working together to connect customers to the doorstep of the cloud with a vast and varied choice of potential partners and other SaaS providers, in the Equinix location of their choice."

Bas Burger, CEO, Business, BT, said: “Global Fabric will future proof customers’ connectivity by providing flexibility to ensure they’re always connected so they can always be productive. They’re facing a new wave of digital revolution with AI, IoT and automation driving demand for simplicity and better multi-cloud connectivity. Customers can achieve better total costs, boost app performance and user experience, all while complying with regulations and mitigating cyber threats. Global Fabric means multi-cloud works better on BT.”

ENDS

Notes to editors

Architected for multi-cloud

The location of Global Fabric’s network hardware is key. Global Fabric’s cloud-centric architecture will give it the most direct coverage of hyperscaler clouds of any connectivity provider in the world — almost 50 per cent more than the nearest competitor, based on connectivity information published on hyperscaler websites. Hyperscale clouds include those of AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.

Running on the new network “underlay” will be an AI-powered digital orchestration layer. Unlike the Internet, Global Fabric will be “deterministic” — customers will be able to trust BT to deliver the predictable application experience they expect by selecting the optimal end-to-end paths for their applications and workloads as they move to and between multiple clouds and end users.

Connectivity options

Options will include a new BT-enhanced Internet service, point-to-point Ethernet, multi-point Ethernet and MPLS and these will be offered in bandwidth increments of 1 Mbps up to 100 Gbps. Connectivity will be interchangeable on the same port, offering flexibility not possible on current networks.

Global Fabric and sustainability – key figures

Using the Greenhouse Gas Protocol ICT Sector Guidance by Gesi, BT has generated the following estimates:

• In use, Global Fabric will consume 8,326 MWh/year versus its existing international networks at 39,890 MWh/year — a 79 per cent reduction.
• Use stage gross carbon including PUE will be 2,964 tonCO2e/year for Global Fabric versus 13,596 tonCO2e/year for BT’s existing international networks — a 78 per cent reduction.
• Global Fabric’s embodied emissions will be 363 tonCO2e/year versus its existing international networks 2,185 tonCO2e/year — an 83 per cent reduction.
• This gives a total carbon in use plus embodied carbon figure of 3,327 for Global Fabric versus its existing international networks at 15,781 tonCO2e/year — a 78 per cent reduction.
• BT estimates the average power consumption of Global Fabric will be 787 Watts per device, versus 2,201 Watts per device for its existing international networks.
• Moreover, Global Fabric will be built using 1,326 devices versus 1,571 devices — a 16 per cent reduction versus its existing international networks.

BT and Five9, a leading provider of the intelligent CX Platform, today announced that they are expanding their partnership to enhance the choice of contact centre services and solutions offered to organisations globally.

BT will now offer the Five9 Intelligent CX Platform to new and existing customers as a managed service to help them fully digitalise their workplace through tighter integration with existing voice, digital channels, unified communications and customer relationship management (CRM) systems. The integration of the cloud-native Five9 Intelligent CX Platform with BT’s secure, expansive and reliable Global Managed Voice platform offers customers an end-to-end managed service, cloud migration expertise and access to BT’s extensive experience and capabilities in managing complex technology environments.

BT customers can now choose from a range of Five9 options including digital engagement channels, analytics, workflow automation and optimisation, along with practical AI to engage and empower their contact centre agents. In addition, Five9 offers pre-built call centre integrations with leading CRM solutions, including Salesforce, ServiceNow, Microsoft, Oracle and Zendesk.

BT will also offer access to Five9’s artificial intelligence (AI) and automation solutions, including Five9 Intelligent Virtual Agent (IVA), which are embedded in the platform. These solutions can help automate processes and manage routine calls, while automatically providing agents with caller details to improve efficiency.

The expanded partnership builds on an existing agreement between BT and Five9. In November 2022, Five9 named BT its strategic carrier for voice and network services globally. This enables Five9 to expand into new markets and offer its global customers a service with improved call quality.

Andrew Small, managing director, global portfolio, Business, BT, said: “Our Five9 partnership offers BT customers a secure and future-proof route to migrate their contact centre into the cloud. BT and Five9’s combined expertise will help customers manage the transition seamlessly and enjoy the full benefits of a managed CCaaS service.”

“It is an honour to continue expanding our partnership with BT to deliver a high quality intelligent CX solution via a BT network-enabled, managed cloud service powered by Five9,” said Jake Butterbaugh, SVP Global Partner at Five9. “Enterprises now have access to Five9’s leading Intelligent CX Platform seamlessly embedded with BT’s world-class voice and data services to create more fluid experiences for their customers. This partnership reflects Five9’s commitment to grow our partner ecosystem and cultivate powerful, global partnerships to deliver CX solutions to global customers.”

BT will be attending the upcoming Five9 CX Summit EMEA hosted in Porto, Portugal and will be a featured presenter.  For more information click here

Notes to editors

About BT’s Managed Contact Centre services

BT offers businesses and organisations in the UK and globally customer experience solutions to improve agent and customer experience, with professional services to plan, implement and manage them end-to-end. Its services and solutions enable omnichannel interactions including voice, email, webchat, messenger, SMS and social media.

BT’s Inbound Contact Global platform supports inbound voice services worldwide, with physical access nodes in over 45 countries, originations from over 180 countries, and terminations to anywhere in the world. Its cloud contact centre services are supported by resilient global Contact Hubs offering a wealth of experience in customer experience transformation. BT’s Inbound Contact platforms serve over 55,000 customers globally, and more than 16 billion minutes of calls per year. Over 65,000 agents use it worldwide.

BT works with an ecosystem of partners including Five9 to deliver innovative and market leading technology. Our Cloud Contact platforms have connectors with leading CRM systems including Salesforce, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics, SAP, ServiceNow and Zendesk.

BT helps customers build secure end-to-end contact centres. It offers applications to protect against the dangers of fraud, all seamlessly integrated with its secure network. It also offers expertise to help customers navigate compliance and regulatory requirements.

About Five9

The Five9 Intelligent CX Platform provides a comprehensive suite of solutions for orchestrating fluid customer experiences and empowering agents. Our cloud-native, multi-tenant, scalable, reliable and secure platform includes contact center; omni-channel engagement; Workforce Engagement Management; extensibility through more than 1,000 partners; and innovative, practical AI, automation and journey analytics that are embedded as part of the platform. Five9 brings the power of people, partners and technology to more than 2,500 organizations worldwide. Through this combination, Five9 supports customer needs from Day 1 to forever and delivers on our customer commitment: “We keep our CX promise, so you can keep yours.” 

For more information, visit www.five9.com

Powered by AI technology within Foresight Optima^TM from QiO Technologies, it combines the latest in machine learning with BT Edge Compute devices. Customers can also benefit from BT’s wider digital industries capabilities, including IoT, cloud and secure connectivity, in a single managed solution.

The new solution brings together real-time data from IoT sensors, machinery control settings, databases, external data and energy sources to identify the variables that can be optimised to reduce energy consumption, and can also help improve quality, productivity, and other relevant factors.

The resulting energy efficiency index (EEI) looks at past configurations of the process and compares them to see which were most energy efficient and why. It can also compare sites and equipment to look for best practices.

The solution is hosted on a BT Edge Compute device, which ensures data can be securely processed by the AI close to where it is created. BT securely connects the device to all relevant systems, hardware and assets to give total visibility of the process being measured. Connectivity options include private 5G.

QiO’s AI has been successfully deployed across a wide range of industries, including glass, steel, cement, automotive and others, delivering energy savings between 5-15 per cent. For example, QIO’s deployment at a leading glass manufacturer reduced energy consumption by six per cent and carbon emissions by 21,600 tonnes.

“I believe we have a very important role to play in addressing the climate crisis. By partnering with customers, we can help them achieve net zero carbon emissions,” said Hriday Ravindranath, Chief Product & Digital Officer, Global, BT.

“Data is key,” he added. “Too many organisations still gather carbon data manually, making reporting difficult and limiting its usefulness in improving operations. Our solution collects data securely, and by using QiO’s AI, recommends steps to optimise processes. Moreover, customers can use this data to report on their performance in a standardised way. It’s a great example of how we’re delivering on our Manifesto commitments and connecting for good.”

“Our partnership with BT will deliver the benefit of QiO Foresight Optima^TM to asset heavy and energy intensive industry to help meet sustainability and net zero goals,” said Rick Haythornthwaite, Chairman & Co-Founder, QiO Technologies. “Combined with BT’s industry knowledge and connectivity expertise, we can accelerate delivery of energy efficiency, carbon emissions reduction and cost savings for organisations globally.”

ENDS

About QiO

QiO Technologies is a Gartner Magic Quadrant Industrial IoT AI Software products company delivering Sustainability and Industry4.0 solutions for the industrial sector.

Since 2015, QiO has built a global track record with leading industrial companies by optimising their operations, reducing their energy costs and carbon emissions, delivering 5-15 per cent efficiency improvement, and expediting their sustainability agenda.

QiO’s solutions are available across multiple industries, including aerospace, automotive, steel, glass, cement, oil and gas, healthcare, data centers and shipping

For more information, visit www.qio.io

BT today announced it is upgrading the global network of leading commercial explosives and blasting systems provider Orica with the latest cloud-optimised technology and cyber security solutions. The upgrade is part of Orica’s digital transformation and will support the migration of applications and services to the cloud.

Orica, which operates in more than 100 countries, utilises innovative, market-leading digital solutions built on cutting-edge technology and automation to create safer, more productive blast outcomes for customers.

The new managed network service, based on Cisco SD-WAN technology, will provide secure and flexible connectivity for the company’s more than 13,000 employees, many of whom work remotely on customer sites around the world.

For Orica’s IT team, BT will provide a single dashboard with comprehensive visibility of network traffic flows, infrastructure monitoring, applications performance management tools, end-user experience monitoring, security and event logging, and inventory discovery. Wrapped in ITIL service management, the dashboard will provide the capability to optimise an individual application’s performance to match business needs.

BT will also help Orica enhance cyber security across the new network and extend it into the manufacturing environment. BT’s security experts will deploy and manage a range of security solutions, including next generation firewalls from Cisco, and an enhanced remote access solution for Orica’s mobile workforce.

Angus Melbourne, Orica’s chief technology officer, said: “BT has been our trusted network partner for five years. We considered many technology and service options for our digital transformation and eventually chose BT as it offers a fully managed service built around our preferred technical solution covering Orica’s global locations. Our network transformation will not only result in improved service, but also reduce the cost of our global network.”

Joris van Oers, managing director, resources, manufacturing and logistics & Europe, Global, BT, said: “It’s great to see our two long-standing relationships continue to bear fruit. Firstly, we are delighted to continue supporting our innovative and dynamic customer Orica, and help their teams conduct their jobs safely, productively and sustainably. And secondly, we are drawing on the strength of our global partnership with Cisco to deliver the latest networking solutions required for our customer’s successful digital transformation.”

BT announced today an extension of its long-term strategic agreement with Syngenta, one of the world’s leading agricultural technology companies.

Syngenta helps improve global food security by enabling millions of farmers to make better use of available resources. As part of the extended strategic agreement, BT will support Syngenta’s requirements for flexible and adaptable consumption of services covering advanced networking, connectivity and security solutions, while aiming to create additional opportunities for joint innovation.

Through highly reliable services that enable collaboration and communication, BT will help Syngenta Crop Protection and Syngenta Seeds focus on being a market leader with world-class science and innovative crop solutions that help farmers sustainably grow more from less.

BT will continue to provide a full range of networking and communication services, as well as cloud security, to support Syngenta’s operations across more than 400 locations in 60 countries. These include key agriculture markets in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Brazil, China, India, Egypt and Ukraine.

In addition, this renewal provides the foundation for an ongoing relationship and potential to explore new ways BT could enable Syngenta’s growth and sustainability ambitions.

Nadja Risse, director of healthcare and life sciences at Global, BT, said: “Since 2000, BT has been a key enabler of Syngenta’s successful digital journey and we are honoured to continue our long-standing relationship with one of the most innovative global leaders in the sector. As we launch more and more digitally native services in our portfolio, BT will look to help empower Syngenta to achieve its ambitious sustainability goals and unlock opportunities to transform farmers’ lives through data and science.”

The two ‘value added licences’, China nationwide Domestic IP-VPN licence and China nationwide Internet Service Provider (ISP) licence, enable BT China Communications Limited to contract directly with its customers in the country and bill them in local currency.

The value added licences represent a major step for BT in China where many of its multinational customers require secure and reliable connectivity to expand within the country.

Bas Burger, CEO of Global Services, BT, said: “We are delighted with this major benefit for our customers. Thanks to cooperation between the governments of the PRC and the UK, we are now able to offer a nationwide service in China that can be scaled up to match the ambitions and needs of our customers. Being able to service and bill locally significantly simplifies the process of delivering connectivity and other communication services. It is what our customers expect from us and we are very grateful for the opportunity to do this as of today.”

International Trade Secretary, Dr Liam Fox MP said: “I am very pleased that close cooperation between the UK and Chinese governments has resulted in BT securing these licences which will enable it to operate across the country. This major milestone exemplifies the vital work of my international economic department to open up markets and ensure that UK firms are represented on the global stage.”