Enabling BT’s global customers to consume multiple cloud solutions using a single platform

Business Objectives

In the highly competitive cloud compute market, BT was looking for a way to stay ahead of the game, implementing its Cloud of Clouds strategy to give global organizations access to multiple cloud providers. Through bringing together a combination of different cloud (e.g. AWS, Azure etc) and other third party application providers, multinational customers would be empowered to adopt cloud in a simple and centralized way. BT chose Beyond Now’s powerful Infonova software to underpin its platform – called Compute Management System (CMS) – to connect its global customers to these diverse cloud services. CMS, with its self-serve capabilities, offers through a ‘single pane of glass’, a multi-country, multi-currency, multi-cloud enabler.

A centralized, software-driven platform as the monetization engine of CMS

Delivered in eight months, Beyond Now’s Infonova was implemented at the heart of BT’s CMS. This created a centralized platform that enabled the management and usage-based billing of different cloud services, handling offer creation, customer and account management, billing, and the allocation of revenues and costs to each involved partner. In parallel, BT also deployed its own SSO (single sign on) and IDM (identity management) platform, enabling customers to access and manage purchased cloud, storage and application services as self-serve.

Beyond Now’s Infonova next generation software enables BT to seamlessly onboard and aggregate cloud services, offering these as products and services to customers who can then exploit the full benefits of cloud and digital transformation.

Advantages of CMS:

• Manages products and services centrally and allows customers to consume locally – anywhere in the world, in a variety of pricing constructs, with different currencies, and with the capability to settle financially between BT-selling and BT-supplying country operations 
•  Customers can contract online and fully self-serve, via any of BT’s global ‘in country’ subsidiaries, with the right contract terms and appropriate currency
• Bills can be allocated across the customer’s various business units and departments worldwide
• The customer’s contracting party has administrative rights to allocate access to the appropriate services for their global employees
• CMS is a technology and service agnostic platform which provides customers with a unified experience across all onboarded products and services, effectively operating as a single commercial pane of glass
• The capability to provide customers with a fully managed and completely partitioned use of the whole CMS platform, where the customer is able to define their own cloud products, services and pricing to offer within a closed community market and user group

Providing digital business enablement to customers with a range of cloud-based services that can be accessed managed and monetized centrally

BT provides multi-nationals with compute, storage and application services worldwide with access to BT’s 20 global data centres as well as access to other third-parties such as Amazon Web Services, Azure etc, from a single pane of glass. BT Compute’s cloud helps CIOs to build powerful ‘pay as you go’ cloud solutions with high levels of quality, security and service delivered from BT.

Beyond Now’s Infonova software, with its unique, multi-tenant/multi-party architecture, enabled BT to move from a set of bespoke and variable separate country offerings, to the establishment of a globally managed offering delivered and consumed locally on a self-service basis.  This means: the seamless introduction of new cloud services and software applications onto the platform gives BT fast time to market for new cloud offerings supported by a central product catalog with flexible configuration capabilities.

The successful implementation of BT’s CMS opened up a unique proposition for BT’s enterprise customers. BT realized that its vision described digital enablement, orchestration and monetization for any type of company which might wish to offer combinations of bundled products and services. This is especially true where this would need long run contracting, offering capabilities with business rules, technical dependency management capabilities and flexibility.  Through leveraging the software’s multi-tenant and partnering capabilities, BT could enable any organization to compete in the digital economy by launching digital services to the market fast and with low risk – virtualizing the offering for global organizations to use it “as-a-service”, as opposed to bearing the high cost and complexity that comes with self-build.

As a result, BT launched the world’s first digital Business Platform as a Service in September 2017, allowing companies to:

• Onboard and digitize existing products and services
• Combine products and services across internal Lines of Business (LoBs) and Operating Companies) OpCos
• Launch new digital services for Smart X scenarios, such as Smart City & Connected Car
• Create new partnering business models, services and solutions
• Establish new partners and monetize each other’s products and services with ease
• Combine own products and services with those of external partners to create new products and service offerings
• And much more