Johannesburg, 18 Nov 2014
BT, one of the world's leading providers of communications solutions and services, today announced new cloud services aimed at supporting the expansion plans of its customers in Asia-Pacific, the Middle East and Africa (AMEA), and helping them orchestrate the most recent technology to deliver great business outcomes.
Backed by its global network infrastructure and leveraging its position as a leading provider of unified communications and collaboration services, BT launches the following new cloud services in the AMEA region:
* BT One Cloud Cisco: a reliable, resilient global platform that features full unified communications capabilities, including high-definition (HD) voice, multiparty HD video to improve the impact of virtual meetings, Instant Messaging (IM) and presence, and mobile clients delivered by Cisco Jabber. Global coverage and resilience are ensured through BT's data centres in the Americas, the UK and Asia Pacific. Those data centres are paired one to another in geographically remote cities to bring additional resilience to services in case of major incidents.
* BT One Cloud Lync: A fully-managed private cloud service with enterprise telephony and video with the standard feature set of presence, IM and conferencing in a single, unified platform.1
Both services are available to customers on a pay-per-user basis. 2
BT is also launching its Cloud Connect programme across AMEA. Customers across the region will now be able to connect directly through BT's network to various other software-as-a-service providers and to more than 200 third-party data centres around the world. By building acceleration and security features into the network, BT is now increasing application performance, reducing bandwidth costs and improving security for our customers in the AMEA region. The Cloud Connect programme 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 up delivery.
BT is also announcing today the availability of BT for Life Sciences R&D in AMEA. BT for Life Sciences R&D is the first cloud service designed to enable collaboration within the life sciences industry for increased R&D productivity. It is specifically designed to allow organisations active in the life sciences, biotechnology, pharmaceutical and associated sectors to comply with stringent security, regulatory and compliance requirements, while accessing the very high computational demands of R&D and adopting the latest in cloud computing, collaboration, and unified communications. The solution is based on the BT Cloud Compute platform and delivered through BT data centres. It has already been deployed with Genome Institute of Singapore and is being rolled out in Japan.
Kevin Taylor, President, BT Asia Pacific, Middle East & Africa, said: "We are proud to see our customers leverage the investments we have made in the AMEA region in the last few years. These have included improved network infrastructure, an enhanced product portfolio, strengthened field services, customer showcases and the establishment of service centres in the region. In the first half of this financial year, we have grown our revenue across the region by more than 10% and have doubled the value of our new orders compared with the same period last year. We are committed to continue building a healthier business and are continuing to invest in innovative solutions that customers will deploy and combine to deliver stunning business outcomes. In the last few months, those efforts have resulted in extensions of relationships with existing customers such as Deutsche Post DHL, Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore, as well as significant new contracts with well-known brands such as Genome Institute of Singapore, JABIL, Singapore Airlines, Williams Lea and WorleyParsons."
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