BT Group to Combine Global and Enterprise Units into BT Business
As expected, telecoms giant BT has today confirmed the next phase of their huge re-branding exercise, which in this case will see them combining their Global and Enterprise (inc. Wholesale) units into a single business-to-business unit, called BT Business – led by Bas Burger, the current CEO of BT’s Global unit.
Just to recap. Back in April 2022 BT announced a major shake-up of their branding, which will eventually see EE become the “flagship brand for our consumer customers” and BT become the flagship for their Enterprise and Global units (here). Today’s development is a continuation of the latter part of that plan.
The operator hopes that all of this will create a simpler BT Group with three Customer Facing Units (CFU): ‘Consumer‘ supporting UK consumers; ‘BT Business‘ supporting business and public sector customers; and ‘Openreach‘ delivering UK nationwide fixed access and full fibre (FTTP) broadband infrastructure.
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BT said that its new ‘Business’ division will be setup to enhance value for all their B2B customers, strengthen our competitive position, and deliver material synergies by:
• Leveraging the full scale and capabilities of BT Group to develop and deliver market-leading products and services for all our B2B customers, including next generation connectivity and unified communications, multi-cloud networking, and advanced security solutions.
• Creating a single interface to BT Group for our corporate customers and public sector institutions, combining our vertical sectoral expertise and capabilities, and removing the current duplication between Enterprise and Global.
• Driving significant and rapid gross annualised cost savings of at least £100m by the end of FY25 through consolidation and rationalisation of management teams, support functions, product portfolios and systems.
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The new CEO of BT Business, Bas, will lead the new unit from 1st January 2023, although it won’t formally commence reporting as a single unit until 1st April 2023.
Philip Jansen, BT Group CEO, said:
“BT Group is a leading provider of B2B connectivity and related services to UK and multi-national corporations, government and public sector organisations worldwide, as well as UK SMEs1 and SoHos2. BT Enterprise is the market leader in the UK, with a market share of 30% underpinned by BT Group’s fixed and mobile network leadership, the strength of the BT brand, and national sales, service and distribution. BT Global serves many of the world’s largest companies and is consistently rated as a leader for its networking and security services and has ambition to be the leading provider of secure multi-cloud connectivity.”
By combining the two units, BT Business will bring the Group’s combined assets, products, capabilities and brand to the service of all of our 1.2m business customers who will benefit from faster innovation and delivery. Bas is an excellent leader and I’m confident he will build on the plans already underway and drive the combined business back to growth.”
The existing CEO of BT Enterprise, Rob Shuter, will support Bas with the integration over the next few months and will then be “leaving BT to step down from executive life and spend more time with family and on his personal interests.“
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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What happens to BT Wholesale, which many ISPs interface into instead of dealing directly with Openreach? Does this become part of BT Business too?
I’ve clarified that above, but yes.
It surely will. It’s part of Enterprise currently.
“consumer” will soon be rebranded to EE… completing the transition will be Plusnet disappaering and becoming EE. Plusnet Business already moved to BT Business.
I would not want to change from plusnet to EE, unless they improve things. EE customer service compared to Plusnet is awful, which is strange considering it is the same company. Also the router EE uses seems to be very unreliable, I don’t know what it is based on, but it is not great. At the end of the day if I wanted to go with EE then I would have.
@Ad47UK – The current EE router is based on the BT Smarthub 2, the Plusnet one the BT smarthub. All three brands hardware is developed by the same team in BT.
The networks are also designed/run by the same teams and apart from the IP address you are getting they are much the same now.
The support teams are increasingly integrated too, with the teams in the same offices in some cases. I know a while back some of the Plusnet support team were actually EE. So I’d not expect much difference between any of the brands now.
How does this exercise of rearranging the deck chairs improve BT?
It’s still one of worst rated businesses (for BT Broadband, see Trustpilot reviews).
And the share price for BT Group are still in a longterm downwards trend.
Because…. BT do more than just supply broadband.
In fairness to BT, you can’t really trust the trust pilot for accurate ratings. People will generally only go on when something goes wrong.