BT International Launches to Serve Multinational Customers

Telecoms and broadband giant BT Group yesterday officially launched their new standalone ‘International’ unit to serve their multinational customers, which was previously predicted (here) to comprise over 8,000 staff and will report separately from the company’s UK business.

The operator has been gradually reducing their international operations for some time as part of wider cost-cutting plans. The decision to shift what remains of that into a separate unit, while complex, could make it easier and more cost-effective to manage. On the flip side, it might also make the whole thing easier to sell, or possibly even to merge with another network operator.

The former chief of BT Business, Bas Burger, has been tasked with running the new unit and taking on competitors that are often said to have “gained strength” in the wider market. But there’s also the potential for further redundancies as BT brings everything together.

Bas Burger, CEO of BT International, said:

“Today, we launch BT International, serving our multinational customers as a dedicated operation within BT Group with its own people, products and platforms.

It comes as our customers face unprecedented disruption across their markets driven by geopolitics, regulation and technology — with AI catalysing change faster than ever. We have designed BT International specifically to help our customers meet these challenges head on and anticipate future opportunities to thrive.

The way we do this centres on two highly scalable telco platforms designed for the age of multi-cloud and AI: Global Voice and Global Fabric, with security built in by design. We’ve channelled our investments into these cloud-centric global platforms and concentrated our expert teams where customers need them most.

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Looking to the future of our industry, we believe international networks will gravitate towards fewer, larger, telco platforms able to manage the demand generated by increased cloud and AI services. We invite other service providers to work with BT International, as we build out our ecosystem of partners, including our recently announced partnership with Google Cloud, and scale fast so we can, as an industry, offer the best value to customers across the globe.

We’re at a pivotal moment as an industry. It is an opportunity to move away from fragmented legacy international networks to a platform designed with the reality of AI, cyber and cloud at its core, reflecting customers’ expectations of speed, security, sustainability, sovereignty and naturally the skills to support future growth and prosperity.”