BT announces 'business platform as a service'

Telecommunications provider BT has announced its new cloud-based "business-platform-as-a-service" offering, which is aimed at speeding up the time it takes businesses to go to market with digitised services.

BT said the new platform, labelled the BT Personalised Compute Management System (PCMS), allows customers to access, purchase, and bring their own digital services to market within around 12 weeks.

It utilises BT's "cloud of clouds" solution, which connects customers to cloud collaboration apps, security services, third-party datacentres, customer datacentres, and third-party cloud services including Cisco, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Oracle, HPE, Salesforce, Equinix, Google, and IBM Softlayer.

PCMS contains a global catalogue of services with localised sales channels, allowing customers to buy online in their own currency, contract terms, taxation laws, and language, BT explained.

The platform currently has more than 45 digital business support processes, including customer management, product management, user authentication, order management, and billing solutions.

"Users will gain access to ready-made business support processes and functions to enable them to sell, fulfil, and monetise their own portfolio of digital services," BT said.

"Customers wanting rapid entry into the cloud market will be able to resell BT's existing digital ecosystem services such as Cloud Compute, Compute Storage, and Apps from BT available from a choice of 22 locations around the world."

Businesses can choose to consume these services themselves, onsell them to their own customers, or cross-sell them to other PCMS users.

PCMS will be globally available in the last quarter of 2017, after being developed alongside BearingPoint, a management and technology consultancy firm.

According to BearingPoint Digital Ecosystem Management CEO Angus Ward, PCMS has combined his company's expertise in digital business transformation with BT's "skills in digital platform management".

BT in May also took the wraps off its Dynamic Network Services portfolio comprising three offerings: Bandwidth on demand; on-demand virtual services; and on-demand software-defined wide-area networks (SD-WAN).

The first stage enables customers to turn up and down the speeds they're using at will under consumption-based pricing, BT said, which is aimed at aiding the increasing uptake of cloud solutions.

The second phase will see "purely virtual" products, cloud service nodes, and technologies launch by mid-2018, with such network services able to be switched on and off as and where needed by companies, and will be charged via hourly usage, BT told ZDNet.

The final piece of the puzzle involves provisioning on-demand virtual networks, with BT kicking off its SD-WAN suite with the release of Nokia's Agile Connect product, to be joined by Cisco intelligent WAN (IWAN) products in the future.

BT said it is able to extend its virtual networks not only over its own infrastructure, but also over the top of any other carrier.

To match these new network offerings, BT said it is also focused on improving its security services.

BT's Assure Cyber Platform makes use of both a computerised element, which uses learning algorithms to sort through the data and learn from it, in addition to a human element in order to combine creative attention to detail with the "relentless efficiency" of computers.