BT keen to host mission critical applications

Manufacturers can expect 35—40% savings on their IT and network infrastructure if they outsource provision and management to a robust provider. So says Paul Rosher, BT Ignite’s head of infrastructure products in its Application Hosting division – BT’s former Content Hosting and e-business units. This is not about implementing hosted manufacturing enterprise applications, as per the ASP (application service provider) concept. Rosher says it’s about running mission critical collaborative and transactional systems, intranets, extranets and the like – and that BT is absolutely in there. He says BT Ignite can handle any mix of platforms and points out that its services are backed by a huge scale of fully redundant, load balanced data centre. Only last month BT opened its massive £90 million flagship data centre in Cardiff Bay, Wales. In fact, hosting is an integral element of BT’s information and communications technology (ICT) strategy, and is seen by the company as one of its major revenue growth opportunities along with mobility and broadband. It is BT’s combination of network, applications and consultancy that gives it an edge in this arena. Rosher makes the point that with handling some 200Tbytes of data at its managed data centres, BT Ignite knows what it’s doing. “Manufacturers can come to us direct or through their systems integrators when they’ve developed their systems and want us to run them 24/7,” he says. “We have all the hooks so we can run their applications securely and resiliently.” Services available include hosting, storage and security, and there are applications supporting communication, collaboration and e-commerce, as well as business continuity services – and Web services originally developed by BT to unlock its own legacy systems. Rosher agrees that outsourcing is a strategic decision, and accepts there are different levels of comfort in different organisations, depending on the approach to running and developing IT. He says his target firms are the multi-site corporates, but there are also service offerings for SMEs. He also acknowledges that outsourcing has gone through a bad patch and is still the subject of hot debate, but believes the market is now coming round and growing, founded on companies like BT with sound financial and technical track records. “We sell ‘catalogue of lego’ – packaged ‘custom’ capability all based on components so that every company can have its own system and look different, but run it on BT’s infrastructure – and then outsource more and more,” he says.