BT Innovates To Spark Business Creativity

IRVING, Texas, Oct. 9, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- BT today announced a new wave of innovative products and services designed to encourage large organizations to use technology more creatively to deliver stunning business outcomes. Six months into its global "Art of Connecting" campaign, BT brings its newest offers and propositions to a larger number of countries, further extending the reach and depth of its services, and launches new cloud capabilities specifically designed for large enterprises and public sector organizations.

New offer highlights:

• BT Ethernet Connect will be made available in 15 new countries, bringing the total countries served to 65*. Ethernet Connect is BT's family of Ethernet virtual private network services with domestic, in country, and international coverage, at speeds up to 10 Gbps over fiber.
• The total country coverage of BT Internet Connect Global will be extended from 45 to more than 50 countries*. Internet Connect Global is BT's high performance internet service intended for the e-commerce and web presences of multi-site organizations.
• Internet Connect Reach is now launched to provide extended internet coverage to supplement the existing Internet Connect Global with lower cost access options and a range of access technologies in more than 190 countries and territories.
• Eleven new BT Points of Presence are being opened in nine countries* to reduce the length of expensive access circuits between points of presence and customer sites.
• Through our Cloud Connect program, BT customers can be connected directly through BT's network to software-as-a-service providers and to more than 200 third party data centers around the world. We are now improving that connectivity and shortening deployment times. By building acceleration and security features into the network we are increasing application performance, reducing bandwidth costs and improving security. 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 delivery.
• Via BT Cloud Compute, BT is extending its interconnected cloud enabled data centers to Argentina, South Africa and Japan. Cloud Compute is BT's pre-provisioned data center infrastructure that enables customers to create, deploy, monitor and manage their own cloud services. It is available in major economies across Europe, the Americas, the Middle East and Africa and Asia Pacific.
• BT continues to help customers through the Hybrid Cloud by blending private and public cloud assets. BT announced last week that it will leverage Cisco Intercloud Fabric to develop hybrid cloud services that connect with the Cisco Cloud and with the cloud and managed service offerings of Cisco Powered Intercloud Providers. The BT Cloud Compute infrastructure will become fully Intercloud enabled to support highly secure, global hybrid clouds with unparalleled workload portability for BT's customers.
• Apps from BT will give organizations easy and rapid access to enterprise applications hosted in the cloud through a simple to use, automated 'click to deploy' application platform. This provides access to a marketplace of pre-packaged business applications as well as enabling customers to add new or custom applications to the platform.
• BT Compute Storage offers customers long-term back-up, file, as well as file sync and share services in the cloud, at an enterprise-grade level. Data security and trust in consumer cloud services are a rapidly growing concern for CIOs within large organizations, as they move towards BYOD strategies. BT Compute Storage offers enterprise-grade reliability and security to those file, sync and share services on multiple devices, and will be available globally.
• BT MeetMe with Dolby Voice is now available with the Dolby Conference Phone, an innovative device that dramatically improves meetings, providing great sound quality and capabilities that bridge the gap between in-room and remote participants so that all meeting participants can contribute equally. Exclusive to BT, MeetMe with Dolby Voice, is an audio conferencing service that transforms conference calls by replicating the sound of face to face meetings.
• BT Assure Threat Defense is being launched to help customers and security analysts better identify and react to advanced and sophisticated cyber security threats. Assure Threat Defense combines cutting edge event monitoring technology and professional services.

Luis Alvarez, CEO BT Global Services, said: "The new capabilities announced today are a small subset of the innovation we are now bringing to the global market to help our customers deliver a great performance and fully realize the possibilities in the cloud. Our customers need to move faster and better than their competitors to fully address opportunities in an era of instant globalization. That requires continuous transformation, operational improvements and creative solutions, leveraging state of the art networked IT capabilities. The promise of IT has never been greater and we deliver on that promise. Not only in the brilliant technology that we develop in our research centers, where we just now broke a world record in data transmission speeds, but in the creative way we combine each and every technology to get the best results for our customers. We do this all around the world and across the key industry sectors. That is what we call the Art of Connecting." 

All news can be accessed at our web sites: http://www.globalservices.bt.com/us/en/news and http://www.btplc.com/news 

About BT
BT is one of the world's leading providers of communications services and solutions, serving customers in more than 170 countries. Its principal activities include the provision of networked IT services globally; local, national and international telecommunications services to its customers for use at home, at work and on the move; broadband, TV and internet products and services; and converged fixed/mobile products and services. BT consists principally of five lines of business: BT Global Services, BT Business, BT Consumer, BT Wholesale and Openreach.

For the year ended 31 March 2014, BT Group's reported revenue was £18,287m with reported profit before taxation of £2,312m.

British Telecommunications plc (BT) is a wholly-owned subsidiary of BT Group plc and encompasses virtually all businesses and assets of the BT Group. BT Group plc is listed on stock exchanges in London and New York. 
For more information, visit www.btplc.com

*individual country availability to be confirmed

SOURCE BT