Best Managed Services Provider | BT Global Services |
| Last year's winner: | BT Global Services |
| Business segments: | Network services, IT services, CRM, mobility services, security/risk management, unified communications, industry-specific services |
| Shareholders: | British Telecom |
| CEO: | Jeff Kelly |
| Key stats (nine months ending December 31, 2011): | Revenue of £5.8 billion ($7.4 billion), down 3% year on year; EBITDA of £441 million ($715 million), up 8%; narrowed net loss to £93 million (a 28% improvement) |
In 2009 BT Global Services was in trouble, smarting from £1.3 billion ($2.1 billion) in write-downs and a £2 billion loss from a £139 million profit the previous year.
In May 2010, BT Global began implementing Phase One of its "Prosperity" program, which involved £80 million in investments in Asia Pacific across its service portfolio, with a particular emphasis on building up its customer service capabilities.
The results have paid off handsomely - BT Global finished off 3Q 2011 with a 50% increase in order uptake in Asia Pacific and Latin America, and has landed numerous major contracts in recent months with CLSA, Standard Chartered Bank and service integrator Serco, which is BT Global's IT partner for a new hospital in Perth, Australia.
"We're outperforming the market by almost double the growth out here [in APAC]," says Kevin Taylor, president of Asia Pacific for BT Global Services.
BT Global has been busy on the service innovation front in the past year with new product launches such as Ethernet WAN services in nine Asia-Pac cities and QuickStart (a low-cost assessment tool that helps enterprises quantify ROI).
But its real payoff has come from customer-focused initiatives, such as its six customer innovation showcase centers - Beijing, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney, New Delhi and Shanghai - its Bid Response Center (BRC) and an Account Start Up unit in Singapore.
BT has also hired more than 200 staff in the region, with a special emphasis on customer-facing personnel with consultancy and IT skillsets to best serve customers. The company has plans to hire more, though Taylor says the operator is taking care to guard against hiring too many people.
"That's always a challenge because we don't want to lower our quality threshold. We want to raise the bar, which we've done," he explains.
Another challenge, Taylor adds, was extending the portfolio out to markets in a consistent way and "drilling it into the sales channel", which was challenging because of the amount of new services and capabilities being rolled out.
"We had a very focused training schedule for our sales channel and our technical people," Taylor says. "We also segmented the rollouts into quarterly cycles so they didn't have to bite everything off on a month to month basis, so we had a well planned and coordinated rollout strategy."
Taylor says the Prosperity investment strategy has worked so well for Asia that BT Global Services is building on that model for similar programs in Latin America and the Middle East/Africa.
Meanwhile, Taylor says, BT will be spending 2012 and 2013 moving forward on all fronts, to include, of course, the cloud.
"We have a great cloud model with Radianz, where we've clearly got the buy-and-sell side of 15,000 financial communities worldwide all going though our network and into the exchanges," Taylor says. "I think we carry something like 40% of the world's financial trade traffic now."
Taylor adds that cloud-based applications around verticals such as pharmaceuticals will be a major growth opportunity for BT in the next couple of years. "You'll have a lot of telecom and IT companies looking for the ideal place to put smart vertical applications and run them, and we can create and merge those communities. There will be some neat plays coming out of that in the near future."
The Winners' List
- Best Asian Telecom Carrier – SingTel
- Telecom CEO of the Year - Napoleon Nazareno (Smart Communications)
- Best Mobile Carrier - SK Telecom
- Best Broadband Carrier - Telekom Malaysia
- Best Emerging Market Carrier - Smart Communications
- Best Regional Mobile Group – SingTel
- Best Managed Services Provider - BT Global Services
- Best International Wholesale Carrier – Pacnet
- Best Community Telecom Project – SHINE (Smart Communications)
- Most Innovative Telecom Project - A-Fund (KDDI)
- Best Cloud-based Service - Verizon Enterprise Solutions
Video: Telecom Asia Awards 2012 ceremony