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BT launches virtual data centre service

Tony Chan | June 23, 2009 | 0 Comments

By Pamela Perez, CommsDay International

BT has launched a new virtual data center service that will form the basis of its cloud-computing strategy. The centre is designed to give organisations low-cost access to cloud-based virtual server, storage, security and networking capabilities.

“VDC is the basis of our cloud-computing offering,” Neil Sutton, BT Global Services’ product chief said. “We’ve begun to deliver communications-as-a-service and hosted services for voice, unified communications and CRM, and we see a roadmap where people want to be able to provision an infrastructure end-to-end. We want to deliver those things as a service in a predictable and flexible manner.”

“This is designed for putting a number of the types of applications you see in a typical enterprise onto an infrastructure-as-a-service environment,” Sutton said. “We wouldn’t deliver that over the web currently. If you had certain applications — say a hosted CRM application — and that’s supporting a contact centre, then you’d want to keep the delivery of that typically within your own enterprise and own network. The web doesn’t come with quality-of-service.”

The service will be rolled out across several data centres in Europe, and all components will be available through an online portal where customers can change their infrastructure at any time during their contract, said BT.

BT also hopes to launch VDC in the UK at the end of July, followed by launches in other European countries in the months after that, Sutton said, adding that the company’s biggest customers in Germany, Spain and France will be among the first to be offered the service.

“In today’s turbulent global economy, companies need flexible, efficient and secure networked IT services to sharpen their competitive edge, innovate how they do business and get to market first,” said Hanif Lalani, chief executive of BT Global Services. “Having the click-to-build and buy facility will give them flexibility and ease of provisioning. Deployment times will also be reduced from months to weeks, resulting in further cost savings and efficiencies.”

According to Scott Morrison, a research vice president in Gartner’s enterprise network services division, VDC is a “hybrid” that allows BT to take advantage of its existing physical network and data centre infrastructure.

However, he noted that it also allows the company to begin making the transition to a future service where BT does not necessarily need to own all the underlying assets, reported ZDNet.

“Today, BT has a surprisingly large number of data centres, particularly in Europe and the UK,” Morrison told ZDNet UK. “To be closer to customers and deal with customer needs in the future, BT’s existing footprint may not serve all those needs.”

“It may not be in BT’s interests to continue owning all those components, especially as other carriers are making big investments in building out large-scale data centres,” he added. “In the future, BT’s real interest is in the service layer on the top. So it has to create an architecture that allows it to deliver that service layer effectively, without necessarily owning all of the bits that sit underneath — and not have an architecture that is based on a BT-specific design set to make it all work.”

This article was first published in CommsDay International

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