34 01732 759725 Q&A listen. So where are they asking for support? Integrating with APIs, as I’ve mentioned, and commercials. It’s difficult to have indirect-indirect- end user in the supply chain and have an attractive commercial proposition for an end user. That’s why being efficient is so important. They’re also asking us about how they should be using AI to enable their businesses, for example in how their salespeople engage with customers. We help partners with that by providing proposition materials that they can white-label and put their own logo on; we provide bid support; and we provide marketing support as well. Those are just a few examples. Ultimately, everyone in this space is looking at how they can run their business more efficiently. If you think about that as a principle, you can imagine the kinds of question we get asked, it’s everything from how do we run our service team more efficiently all the way through to ‘we need a little bit of money off this type of connectivity because it’s selling really well and there’s more money to be made’. TR: What are your priorities for the next 12 months? TS: The software layer that’s going to sit on top of the products; high bandwidth FTTP, above I Gig; investment in the digital voice portfolio; investment in APIs; and, from a cultural perspective, always listening, always responding to feedback. Essentially, a continuation of the things we’re doing already. Probably not in the next 12 months, but after that, network-as-a-service will be a big development for us. TR: Can you tell me a bit more about that at this stage? TS: It’s an always-on network where you can flex bandwidth up and down without a commercial commitment at the beginning, so a business can say ‘I want to change my 100 Meg to 1 Gig’ and they don’t need to wait for an engineer to visit. It changes instantly. It’s that continuation of softwarebased networking. Then, through that software layer, we will have an ecosystem of other products that are available, so you can add IP voice and a suite of solutions, all software-based. We’re still at the design phase, we’re still defining the requirements of the solution, so nothing is yet set in stone, but I’m really very excited about it. I don’t think anyone else in the UK will be able to get to where we are with that. really well, addressing the demand for collaboration when customers are out and about. And we’re seeing good demand for FTTP: demand for above 1Gb connectivity is growing quite fast, and there’s a little bit of substitution from Ethernet. The way my team approaches connectivity is to help partners design networking solutions rather than discount. Instead of doing Ethernet as cheaply as possible, because obviously it’s a much higher price point than FTTP, where FTTP is available we always go FTTP-first. In the next 24 months, we expect to see growing demand for APIs, for ordering and interactions from fault to repair, and growth in the network-asa-service space – the ability to deliver secure, scalable and future-ready solutions very quickly. Those are the areas we’re investing in. TR: One thing BT Business has launched recently is its UK sovereignty platform. Do you see a lot of potential in that offering? TS: I do, and that’s obviously something I and my team on the network infrastructure side have been deeply involved with. We’re not yet going to market with that in Wholesale, but I cannot foresee a world in which businesses won’t soon be demanding that their data doesn’t leave the UK. I think we will launch it in Wholesale as part of the network-as-a-service proposition which we’re still building and for which I don’t yet have a launch date. TR: In what areas are partners challenged and asking for more support? TS: There are a lot of partners out there that have a lot of challenges. To be completely direct, we don’t always get it right. I think it’s important to be honest about that. But we do always portfolio which have been really well received by partners. Those are probably the things I feel most proud of. But when I look at that list, I think about how much more we have to do. The drive is there to continue in that direction. TR: You mention APIs, which should help reduce the cost to serve. What are some of the other main challenges that BT Wholesale faces as a business? TS: How long have you got? I’m sure anyone in business would give you quite a long list. I think the main challenges are the headwinds in the industry, the move off that legacy infrastructure, removal of copper from networks, and the introduction of AI. How are our customers wanting to use that? How do they want to use our infrastructure to enable them to use AI? Those are probably the main challenges. The other challenge I talk about is the uptake of APIs and encouraging or assisting customers and partners to use them so that they can, with minimal investment, bring the cost of serve right down. One partner was telling us recently how they had managed to significantly reduce their operational costs using one of our APIs for their repair journeys. Because everything was visible through the API they had integrated, they didn’t need to call one of our service colleagues who would then have had to call someone in Openreach. TR: What are the key growth areas in your product offering? TS: We are seeing very good growth in mobile, which is being driven by hybrid working and the need to have connectivity outside the office. That complete mobile EE proposition is doing really well. Teams for Mobile is doing ...continued
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NDUxNDM=