BT accelerates global investment in dynamic network services

NEW DELHI: Taking a strategic move, BT has decided to accelerate its investment in dynamic network services by integrating a range of new technologies that will make it easier, faster and safer for organizations to move towards a cloud-based IT consumption model and succeed in their ambitious digital transformation journeys.

Those services will leverage technology, systems and tools from BT and its best-of-breed ecosystem of partners. They will combine with the existing portfolio of network services to reinforce BT’s ability to be the leading global cloud services integrator for its multinational customers by covering areas such as self-service VPNs, flexible bandwidth, virtual services and more.

As part of that investment, BT has selected Nuage Networks from Nokia to contribute technology for its future software defined WAN service. As large organizations in the UK and around the world rapidly increase their use of cloud services and seek to maximize the opportunities of their digital future, they want to be able to access specific network services with maximum flexibility and agility, while maintaining the highest degree of security.

BT’s ongoing investments in dynamic network services respond to that demand through the development of innovative sets of capabilities, based on new programmable technology that leverages Network Function Virtualisation (NFV), Software Defined Networks (SDN) and Software Defined Wide Area Networking (SD-WAN). Those investments add to BT’s network services portfolio and execute on BT’s strategic vision of delivering the broadest possible range of network services to customers to meet their diverse connectivity needs.

Chet Patel, President of global portfolio & marketing, BT, said, “We aim to be the leading global cloud of clouds services integrator for our customers. As part of that strategy, we are now leveraging our expertise in SDN and NFV technology and using the breadth and depth of our global network infrastructure to enhance further our portfolio of dynamic network services. To offer more choice to our customers, we are constantly reinforcing an ecosystem of world-class partners. We are therefore happy to announce today that we will integrate the technology of Nuage Networks from Nokia into our SD-WAN offering. This is an important stage in a journey that will ultimately give BT customers unparalleled choice, security, resilience, service, and agility in the roll out of high performance networks designed for the age of the cloud.”

Rohit Mehra, Vice President, Network Infrastructure at IDC said, “The digital transformation of businesses is driving new cloud-based IT consumption models and the evolution of networks to software based platforms. This redefines the role of the enterprise WAN and as such, organizations are turning to hybrid WANs to support their diverse application needs. At the same time, with branch connectivity a key requirement for optimizing critical applications, enterprises are leveraging professional services to address their WAN challenges and reduce time to market. Working with an experienced cloud services integrator like BT to tackle complex digital transformation requirements, enterprise IT can be well aligned to find an optimal secure WAN solution and service for its unique needs.”

This announcement by BT follows the recent launch of BT Connect Intelligence IWAN, a managed service that enables organizations to automatically route and optimize network traffic and gain visibility of applications performance without spending more on bandwidth. The initial launch of BT’s SD-WAN service incorporating Nuage Networks technology from Nokia is planned for early 2017. It is specifically being developed to serve global organizations using a cloud-based IT consumption model and will complement BT’s existing IP and Ethernet VPN offering. In the coming months, BT will unveil further details of its roadmap for other software-defined services, aligning to the SDN capabilities that are being introduced in BT’s cloud-service nodes. These will enable organizations to control both their network connectivity and hosted applications from a single SDN-automated infrastructure. Organizations will also be able to choose how they take this control. Their options will include a portal-based self-service or centralized account-driven service management. Also, coming, BT’s SD-WAN services will integrate with new virtual services that will include ‘try before you buy’ capabilities and be consumed on a utility basis. Virtual Customer Premises Equipment (vCPE) capabilities will provide integrated 'branch in a box' services, using the centralized automation of SD-WAN. And, with this, customers will be able to simultaneously control their on premise and network applications. Details about BT’s ‘Cloud of Clouds’ portfolio strategy and Dynamic Network Services capabilities can be found here.