BT Group, formerly British Telecom, which was the British telecommunications monopoly and pioneer of the liberalization trend in Europe, has been in Spain for 35 years, but is not as notorious as its role deserves. Since selling the strictly local operations in December 2019, its activity focuses on providing global services to large multinationals. “Among them there are three from the Ibex 35 index, which we accompany to the world market wherever they go. We have been doing the same with other multinationals for years, and some probably feel as Spanish as the native ones,” says José Luis Gastey, general director of BT Business for Spain and Portugal. The company provides services to both of them around the world.
Apart from its natural status as an operator in the United Kingdom, the BT group has always had a global vocation, which Gastey confirms: “I frequently have to explain that this is not BT Spain but BT in Spain.” Almost everyone in this office has responsibilities that transcend Spain. “My most important role is not geographical but that of global director of the industrial sector, one of the four legs of the group, which in turn covers five verticals (manufacturing, life sciences, automotive and transportation, according to the corporate nomenclature). One of the advantages for this type of clientele is that we have no borders. Airbus, for example, has its headquarters in Toulouse, but is also in Seville and Madrid, in addition to Germany, China and the United States. And in each place they have our services.”
What benefits? Gastey summarizes them like this: multicloud, cybersecurity and collaboration. Or, in a less synthetic way, the BT Business offer is structured into three technological platforms plus a fourth service platform, all of them with global reach. “Years ago it became clear to us that we could not set up our own infrastructure everywhere, but we could organize ourselves into strategic platforms that allow us to provide better services than certain companies that preferred to build their own. The first thing is to have a global network, which is currently undergoing transformation for a new generation of networks that provide connectivity, what we internally call the cloud in motion: the data has to reach the cloud and has to move between different clouds in a secure context for data that is increasingly critical.”
The first platform is responsible for optimizing data transfer between the client organization and its mass of users, who are no longer there, and the end user, who is not necessarily in the office. The so-called cloudification of telecoms deserves a paragraph. “We cannot ignore the hyperscalars (as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and, secondarily, Google Cloud) are called, with which BT Business (and before that BT Global) maintains cooperative ties while continuing to differentiate itself. The second – called Eagle Eye – specializes in cybersecurity and collects network intelligence to offer clients a managed security service, with a staff of more than 3,000 experts. The third is a voice and collaboration platform, which resides entirely in the cloud and is integrated with Microsoft Teams.
The global reach of this branch of the British group is illustrative: one of the clients mentioned by Gastey is DHL, with 600,000 employees and 2,000 logistics centers around the world. Leave a reflection. “We are trusted by organizations that have decided to reduce the size of their data centers to lean towards multicloud formulas or hybridity, thereby reducing their capital outlay. But a new risk appears, having your data dispersed and jumping between different clouds. There we believe we have something to say.”