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.

BT and Flexenet today announced a new partnership to give customers more choice in how they to move to cloud-based trading floor communications.  

BT will now offer customers Flexenet Private Wires connectivity fully integrated with its BT Trading unified communications and collaboration (UCC) platform. This will help deliver secure, compliant, high-performance real-time trading for customers globally.

BT Trading is engineered specifically for the global capital markets and can be integrated with leading unified communications systems from Microsoft and Cisco and choice of private wire services. As well as use on physical trading floors, it can be accessed by traders remotely. It includes a powerful suite of applications and devices and can be hosted by customers in their own data centres, by BT or in the public cloud.

Flexenet Private Wires offers secure private voice communication links between traders on the trading floors of investment banks, brokers, and hedge funds across Europe, the Americas, and Asia. By directly integrating it with BT Trading, the partners have created a comprehensive unified communications solution, irrespective of customers’ current voice technology, managed seamlessly as a single package.

“Trading firms globally are reaching a point where the move to cloud-based platforms is irresistible,” said Phil Swindle, CEO, Radianz and Trading & Command, Business, BT. “Obsolescence of legacy systems combined with the compelling benefits of the cloud, such as scalability, flexibility and ease of adopting new technologies, are driving change. The combination of BT Trading with Flexenet Private Wires reassures customers they can support existing services as they transform to new technologies.”

Chris Rose, CEO, Flexenet, said: “Interoperability between SIP and TDM in the delivery of private wires is essential as we work through this global technology transition to cloud. Customers will have a mix of users across each connectivity model so it’s important they have a solution that can address both. Our partnership with BT offers a global, comprehensive solution for customers’ trading needs and equips them perfectly for the cloud transition.”

BT today announced a new era in its partnership with ServiceNow, the leading digital workflow company that makes the world work better for everyone, with plans to launch a turnkey, contact-centre-as-a-service (CCaaS) package integrating digital workflows, global communications and a cloud-hosted contact centre platform.

It is being developed in response to demand from customers to simplify and accelerate digitalisation of their contact centres and workflows. Digitalisation, including the move of contact centre systems into the cloud, offers more flexible and responsive user experiences for both customers and agents. It also helps reduce costs, boost productivity and enables new service innovations and compliance tools.

It will be delivered and managed by BT and ServiceNow to help customers create fully digital, comms-enabled workflows without having to engage multiple partners. It combines ServiceNow’s powerful Now Platform capabilities with BT’s Global Voice network, integrated into a choice of tools, such as call recording, and a leading CCaaS platform.

The partners have already deployed this with UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, with the support of the United Nations International Computing Centre (UNICC). They will now offer it to organisations around the world, including domestic business and public sector customers in the UK.

It marks the latest step in the BT and ServiceNow ongoing partnership. Announced in 2022, the collaboration will allow ServiceNow to partner with BT Group’s Digital unit to modernise service management Group-wide. This will help BT Group create an AI-powered, self-healing digital infrastructure for its business operations.

“Integrating comms into the workflow and case management simplifies compliance processes, makes colleagues more efficient and gives a better experience to everyone,” said Andrew Small, director of voice and digital work, Business, BT. “Our new package in partnership with ServiceNow will create a compelling pathway for customers looking to move to the cloud and achieve all the benefits digital transformation has to offer.”

Chris Bedi, chief digital information officer, ServiceNow, added: “Customers are increasingly looking for turnkey options to remove complexity from cloud migration and workflows. The combination of our cloud‑based platform, with BT’s global network and communication expertise, will offer customers a unique opportunity to digitise and unify their organisations to be smarter and faster.”

ServiceNow, the ServiceNow logo, Now, Now Platform, and other ServiceNow marks are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of ServiceNow, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. 

Cruyff once said: “Quality without results is pointless. Results without quality is boring.” It’s a lesson I’ve applied to business.

BT prides itself on the excellence of its managed services. We work with partners such as Microsoft to offer services that not only deliver the results customers expect but give quality experiences to ensure they are well used and easily adopted across their organisation.  

Around 18 months ago, we renewed and deepened our strategic partnership with Microsoft. Together, we committed to ensuring Microsoft solutions work “best on BT” delivering both quality and results. Here’s an update on our successes so far:

• Innovation

We’re innovating not only in the development of products and services, but in a digital experience. We have a digital quotation journey for Operator Connect and five solutions now available on Microsoft’s commercial Marketplace. On AppSource, we have: Operator Connect for Microsoft Teams with BT; Microsoft Teams Voice with BT; BT Virtual Events for Microsoft Teams Live Events.

And on Azure Marketplace we have: Managed Microsoft Sentinel and Extended Detection and Response (XDR) with BT; and 5G Private Network with Microsoft Azure Multi Edge Computing (MEC).

• Enterprise voice

We said we were migrating our Global Managed Voice platform to run on Microsoft Azure as part of Microsoft’s Azure for Operators programme. This is now live.

We’re offering our Global Managed Voice services directly through Microsoft Teams. And we’ll be launching Microsoft Teams Phone Mobile too.

• Cyber security

We’ve expanded our security portfolio from Managed Sentinel (Cloud SIEM) to include Microsoft Defender and XDR.  We've enabled Microsoft Sentinel onto the UK Government G-Cloud framework for Public Sector. We’re seeing an increasing number of customers buying Microsoft security plus other Microsoft services from BT in a true multi-cloud approach. 

• Industry-focused services

We’re working with Microsoft to develop a new private 5G and edge technology service designed to unlock safety, sustainability, productivity and security for a range of UK industries, from transport and logistics to manufacturing. It will bring together private mobile networks from BT with Microsoft’s Azure private multi-edge computing, which includes Azure Private 5G Core, cloud-managed edge computing and an ecosystem of application partners in robotics, video analytics and IoT.

• Consumer

Over in our Consumer division across both our EE and BT brands, we’ve been highly successful in integrating Microsoft services into a variety of our tariffs and plans. We were the first partner globally to offer M365 as an integrated solution and the integration of Game Pass Ultimate has made us the go-to fixed and mobile network for Xbox and gaming in the UK.

When I last met Omar Abbosh, president of Industry Solutions at Microsoft, he said the world is still at an early stage in its digital journey. “Partnerships are key to progress. Our Microsoft-BT partnership is built on a culture of teamwork, innovation and co-creation. By delivering high-quality digital services to end-users, we motivate customers to adopt digital technology to drive market impact and results,” he said.  

You can find out more about our Group-wide partnership with Microsoft at Mobile World Congress. We’ll have a pod on Microsoft’s stand (Hall 3, Booth #3H30) where you’ll be able to see what we’ve been delivering. This will also feature EE’s successful integration of Microsoft capabilities into market-leading services for XBox, Game Pass Ultimate and Microsoft 365. 

At BT, we aim to be the world’s most trusted connector of people, devices and machines. To earn trust, we must deliver repeatable, predictable results for our innovative managed services. As Cruyff said: “Winning is just one day, a reputation can last a lifetime.”

Two technology trends have emerged — the move to hybrid working and the relentless shift of business applications and services to the cloud, both of which fall under the umbrella of digital transformation.

For many businesses and employees, collaboration platforms such as Webex have been the face of their company’s digital transformation. Adoption of the technology has grown sharply since 2020 and is revolutionising not only ways of working but what’s considered to be a workplace. 

With offices re-opened, businesses and employees are presented with a new question: do we want to “return” to pre-pandemic ways of working or do we invest and push ahead with digital transformation and put those platforms onto a firmer technological footing?

Cloud-enabled collaboration is fundamental to sustaining productivity. But so too is the need for consistency across the business. This means giving everyone, everywhere, at any time — and on any device — full access to the apps and services they need to collaborate effectively and securely. It involves investing in platforms and connectivity to support all workplaces, whether on-site or remote. 

It’s with these drivers in mind that we have expanded our broad collaboration portfolio with the full power of Webex. We’ve enriched our existing Webex Meetings offering to include the new Webex Events, Webinar and polling capabilities. And this year we launched Webex Calling and Webex Contact Centre for both UK and international customers, providing them with scalable, unified cloud-based platforms.

Our Webex Calling and Webex Contact Centre solutions leverage the reach of our voice network and the comprehensive support of our managed service to provide feature rich, scalable cloud-based voice and contact centre offerings. Moving voice to the cloud gives organisations the flexibility to enable true hybrid working for their people, whilst eliminating the cost and complexity of legacy infrastructure.

Brian Stout, vice president of global collaboration sales, Cisco, commented: “These launches form the latest chapter of our three-decade long partnership with BT. BT’s new portfolio of Webex services give our joint customers everything they need to collaborate. Together we can now provide customers with a range of scalable enterprise-grade managed cloud collaboration and customer experience services, which have been purpose-built for hybrid work.”

As businesses try to find a balance between ‘everyone and everything from home’ and ‘everyone back in the office’, in true Goldilocks fashion, the middle path feels ‘just right’. Hybrid working is here to stay.    

Today, we’re marking Microsoft’s announcement of the general availability of Operator Connect for Microsoft Teams with the launch of an entirely new BT-branded global managed voice service.  

It’s at the cutting edge of future voice services innovation. Delivered directly through Teams, it securely integrates telephony, engineered for quality of service, with the very latest in digital collaboration.

For customers, it will provide pace, simplicity and reach, helping them accelerate their digital transformation by enabling new productive, hybrid workstyles built around Teams.

Voice and telephony services have been around for a long time. If you’re a CIO, the chances are you’ve got a mixed bag of voice technologies and services, fixed and mobile, spread across your organisation which may differ from country to country or even site by site. At the same time, your colleagues’ use of Teams has been soaring since the start of the pandemic.

At BT, we’ve seen the number of customers using our managed Teams service almost double in the past year. And according to Microsoft, total calls on Teams surpassed 1 billion in a single month for the first time earlier this year.

Having seen the benefits of digital tools and workstyles, your colleagues now expect to use them to their full potential. They prefer the ergonomics of simply clicking to talk via the Teams app than using a separate phone or voice service. They assume they’re secure and expect a reliable, quality service. And this is as true in the office as at home — and on the move.

Operator Connect for Microsoft Teams with BT offers a simple and secure way of calling in Teams via BT’s global voice network backed with assured end to end service controls for high quality, low latency voice conversations. It’s an entirely new way for multinational organisations operating in different countries to choose and enable their voice services and it doesn’t matter if you’re an existing BT customer or not.

Ripping up the rule book for an established technology like voice is never easy. When you do, it’s good to have experts on hand — two great enterprise technology, cloud and security brands recognised as leaders in their respective fields. It also helps if your service provider has already invested in a technology platform to remove the complexity of change and offer simple choices.

As BT and Microsoft look forward to delivering Operator Connect for customers across the world, Omar Abbosh, corporate vice president of industry solutions at Microsoft, said: “Operator Connect with BT calling plans is the first step in the realisation of our new strategic partnership with BT and meeting the needs and demands of today’s customers.”