BT Global Services is bringing its cloud on clients door steps as the company has launched the new cloud services in the Asia-Pacific, Middle East and Africa (AMEA) market.
The vice president: global portfolio at the company, Andrew Small, said: “This is a period of almost unprecedented change, with the pace presenting a very real challenge to organizations and especially to the IT world, “IT needs to not only follow but also lead in the change. The challenge for IT is keeping up with massive changes; and to be creative and agile and to respond quickly.”
The vice president added that about 65 percent of CIO’s believe that cloud is a critical part of their strategy to deliver commercial impact. He added that cloud is not a one size fits all solution, and there are many different ways to approach it.
BT has launched three new services in the AMEA region:
- BT One Cloud Cisco – this features full Unified Communications capabilities, including high-definition (HD) voice, multiparty HD video to improve the impact of virtual meetings, Instant Messaging (IM) and presence, and mobile clients delivered by Cisco Jabber. Global coverage and resilience are ensured through BT’s data centres in the Americas, the UK and Asia Pacific. Those data centres are paired one to another in geographically remote cities to bring additional resilience to services in case of major incidents.
- BT One Cloud Lync – a fully-managed private cloud service with enterprise telephony and video with the standard feature set of presence, IM and conferencing in a single, unified platform.
Both services are available to customers on a pay per user basis.
- BT for Life Sciences – the first cloud service designed to enable collaboration within the life sciences industry for increased R&D productivity. It’s designed to allow organisations active in the life sciences, biotechnology, pharmaceutical and associated sectors to comply with stringent security, regulatory and compliance requirements while accessing the very high computational demands of R&D and adopting the latest in cloud computing, collaboration, and unified communications.
The solution is based on the BT Cloud Compute platform and delivered through BT data centres. It has already been deployed with Genome Institute of Singapore and is being rolled out in Japan.
Small says: ‘By building acceleration and security features into the network we are now increasing application performance, reducing bandwidth costs and improving security for our customers in the AMEA region. The Cloud Connect program also provides direct connections to BT’s own cloud services, including collaboration and unified communications, IT services and contact management. This reduces costs and speeds up delivery.’
Next month, BT will launch a new satellite service into Africa, as an extension of the current satellite network covering then Middle East and Turkey.
Oliver Fortuin, head of BT Global Services in South Africa, points out that BT has invested heavily in its own fibre in South Africa and, with partnerships, has triangulated Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban.
BT is a global organisation that focuses on: fibre rollout; television and content; mobility and future voice; UK business markets; leading global companies provide services in 93 locations.