Customer-led investment pays off

"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