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<iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Dcdi6xGVwzs?modestbranding=1&rel=0" width="970" height="546" frameborder="0" scrolling="auto" allowfullscreen></iframe>Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (00:05):
Tony Poulos here at FutureNet World 2025 in London. And today I have with me Colin Bannon, who is the CTO of BT business. Colin, welcome.
Colin Bannon, BT Business (00:14):
Hello, Tony.
Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (00:16):
Earlier today in your presentation in part of a panel, you raised the point about enterprise level and coming from an enterprise level, there seems to be a value gap between services rendered and value received. What did you mean by that?
Colin Bannon, BT Business (00:31):
Well, I was actually referring to industry as a whole around the importance of communications and networking. Today, more than ever, the network is actually part of the operational resilience. And I think the challenge with industry is that our narrative is kind of let that be forgotten and kind of leave the network up to the procurement managers rather than the C-suite. When they think about operational resilience, they need to be thinking about network as part of that. And when you have ai, it's part of the computer. So I think really what I was talking about is the industry challenge as a whole to make networking cool again, bring network back to the fore because really without the network, you look at any major multinational business today without the network running, there's really no plan B.
Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (01:27):
You also made the point that cloud service providers are adding value to their services and telcos aren't. What did you mean by that?
Colin Bannon, BT Business (01:35):
Well, that was again, part of the conversation we were having around the narrative is that I do think the cloud service providers in their narrative have been able to attach their services closer to the business outcomes of the customer than the network providers. But today, more than ever, and what's been brilliant in the last year that I've found that even the cloud service providers, their business model previously had been to disrupt the network service providers and say, oh yeah, just buy cloud and don't worry about the network. But now all of the cloud service providers, when they think about an end-to-end SLA, an end-to-end outcome of that application journey, it absolutely includes the network and they're saying the network matters, which is a great place to be. It feels like a real turning this year of a recognition of operational resiliences is absolute and you cannot think about it. And having the hyperscalers really leaning in now, really entering the dialogue, thinking holistically end to end is great for us because we can have more valuable conversations, greater solutions for our customers and better brilliant outcomes.
Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (02:44):
Well, you talked about network and of course I'd like to know what network as a service means to your customers.
Colin Bannon, BT Business (02:50):
Yeah, absolutely. Well, if you think about it, it's really about the platformization of our portfolio and the technology behind it that actually allows it to be transferred. In the past. You think about products and platforms, the way telcos have built them before they've been inorganic. You had internet at one point, you had MPLS at another time, you had Elan, Eline. All the different technologies have evolved at different periods of time. Most of them are all still used, but because they were built at different times, they were built on different platforms. And the way we used to build things was very tightly vertically aligned. Product teams and system stacks, they were hard to break apart. But if you think about a modern customer, they want choice and they also want agility. And actually cutting those very tightly built stovepipes down and turning them horizontal in terms of shared capabilities is a mammoth task, but absolutely required by our customers. And for BT to be able to go at the pace of our customers of what they need, the agility in this world that is changing faster than ever, building a network as a service is really, really important, which we've undertook. You will see a thing what we call global fabric internationally and in the UK we're building UK fabric.
Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (04:14):
Well, that brings me to the point about to what extent does having a telco platform like BT's Global Fabric enable autonomous network operations, and what difference does that make to the day-to-day operation?
Colin Bannon, BT Business (04:26):
It makes a huge difference in terms of outcomes from a customer. I've already talked, agility obviously is the first one. Flexibility is second one for our customer's experience. If you think about they want choice, they want to be able to blend products together, having them on a single platform or being able to change from one to another and not being locked in is really important to this because they need to be able to move and they need partners that are relevant to deal with. The challenges that are upcoming. Behind the scenes of course, is you need platforms that are agile, and as you build a single platform, you actually need to have your inventory correct. And the inventory is really important because in the way we built these stovepipe platforms previously, and in the case of Global Fabric, it's ellan, eline, internet and MPLS, you had different teams that were working along to reenter the data at different processes of the workflow and they would clean the data, they would fix it.
(05:30):
Humans would do that. Now as you have a single autonomous flow and a single platform that is fully automated and fully orchestrated, you actually need to get that data right at the start. So that's really important. And anybody who perhaps in the past the telco has said that they don't have somewhere in the back of the system right now using a spreadsheet, some human doing that is they're probably lying. And that's why it's really important to get this so that humans don't get in the way of the speed that people need the business outcomes. And we need to have a more cloud-like approach on platforms that you can scale and scale is really important and continue to innovate on. And these platforms that we're building now, we only do this once every 15 years. This platform that we're building now will need to be able to continue to innovate in a cost efficient way, in an ability to allow us to bring new features and new products onto our platforms for the next 10 to 15 years.
Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (06:33):
Can the development of telco platforms such as BTS Global Fabric for example, actually help with B2B customers engagement and to meet the needs of enterprises?
Colin Bannon, BT Business (06:43):
Well, that's the killer question, isn't it? The thing that keeps me up at night, there's two things, maybe three. One is operational resilience. I mean, as I've said before, there is no plan B without the network. It's hugely important. We are part of the computer now. We're part of the operational processes. So whatever we do, the network can not stop. It's got to be there and it provides such a critical value. VT is very honored to help run national critical infrastructures, health services, emergency services, hospitals, air traffic controls, logistics companies, all these use cases that are going that if you didn't have the network work, really, really bad things would happen. We're conscious of the souls that are on board of the planes that we're helping support, and it is a really great responsibility. That's number one in how we build national critical infrastructure. The second one is being relevant, building stuff that is relevant for our emerging customer's needs the world and technology is moving faster than ever.
(07:52):
I hate to say it the word it's been said a few times today at the conference. AI is driving great disruption in the market. Geopolitics is also driving great disruption emerging and cyber threats are going greater. So all of these things we need to be building. And the whole reason the Reon Detra of why we built global fabric was to be able to have a platform that is both commercially flexible but also something that really starts to address things like sovereignty. Think of a world where you will have sovereignty extending beyond data at rest and think about data in motion. The internet was built in a time, it's a beautiful thing. It is, but it was built to survive a nuclear war as part of it, but it is geographically ignorant. So when you start to think about regulators or thinking about sovereignty and data in motion, how do you envision, how do you imagine the next version of the internet that actually allows sovereignty to be part of that?
(09:06):
Because overlay services for the last number of years, sass e SD wan, they can't solve for it inherently. You need a programmable underlay fabric that you can take a business intent and inject that by abstracting the path controller and the data plane. So you have and then creating a language of intent into the path controller to allow you to have fine-grained microservices control in the wide area network. So essentially what you're taking is the WAN is the new lan. So what you had in the data center lan, which was infinite capacity, the ability to scale up, the ability to control have east West control and north South, you're extending that out now into the wide area network is a really exciting time. But that allows you new things that you've never thought about and emerging challenges for our customers to solve for that we've never been able to solve before.
Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (10:03):
And what does BT strategic focus in the UK market mean for the future of the global fabric platform? We talked about
Colin Bannon, BT Business (10:11):
Well, scale is everything and we are doubling down on extending our intellectual capital into the UK networks. Now it goes without saying that BT has great investment in the deep parts of the uk, K, the ducks, the fiber, the wholesale networks. There are significant assets that are in the uk. Some of it is regulated and highly regulated and some of it is deregulated. But either way, there are everything. It's safe to say that sophisticated corporations, big corporations running really important challenges have the same challenges about cloud, about security, about agility, about economics, about lock-in in the UK as they do internationally. There is no difference there. And it would be the height of folly to think that that's different. What may be different is to take all the brilliant parts that we've already learned and apply it. And by the way, global Fabric is in the uk, but we're applying it to additional infrastructure in the UK to essentially then leverage even more around the additional assets that we have in the uk.
(11:30):
So it's that plus, which is really exciting to also continue to learn because this is a journey that we've been learning both in how we build portfolio, how we do development, how we leverage ai, how we leverage architectures. And it's a platform evolution that we're going. And this is just another evolution and we have our new CEO, John James has come in who has a very bold vision for winning in the UK market and global fabric and the UK fabric part of that, the assets of what we've already developed is absolutely applicable for the UK and a super exciting journey for what we're doing there.
Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (12:15):
And will that be extended? Will the platform be extended to partners for example?
Colin Bannon, BT Business (12:18):
Well, as I said on stage two things that we've learned, one is that there's segments of the market that we're not necessarily interested in. A managed network service offering from bt, you might call them DIYers, you may call them large sophisticated customers who may want to do it all and they just buy little bits. Now the relationship that I spent a lot of time with him I may have had with the CIO and one of those organizations before was, well, I'd like to work with UBT, but normally how we contract you would take over my teams. And so in a way, it got in the way our relationship got in the way of doing amazing things because there was all or nothing option. And when they did deal with us, they would do a unbundled option with just wires only as a term and then they would build all their stuff on top.
(13:18):
This fundamentally changes it now that we're a platform company, is that we're not a threat anymore on the value added services side. So they can have all the benefits that they can consume as a platform now and it's not a threat. So what's been really surprising and pleasantly surprising is the DIY segment. So what we're seeing is growth interest from other channels than just our direct sales team, but also people wanting to come to the platform itself and transact directly, have control, have this sort of pre quotes and the ability to transact and much greater control as a platform, which is great. And the other aspect to the partners is obviously we are committed to standards bodies like the meth and the TM form and it is incumbent on us to deliver better outcomes for our collective customers to be transparent to each other and to be able to carry business intent across that.
(14:19):
So that involves, and just like the GSMA with the CAMA alliance and others is standardizing gives all of us a form of scale. It may take a little more effort out the front part, but it's worth the effort at the backend because not only that, particularly if vendors start to conform as well, our overall cost to serve go down and the outcomes for our customers go up and the assurance of these things go up on that side as well. And being able to transact. What we've been really pleasantly surprised is as a platform, again, it's not just the DIYers that this becomes quite an interesting platform as a wholesale because not everybody else is willing to invest in the core network transformation to be a full nas. A lot of people are nibbling around the edges, but BT is actually leaned in and are really committed to building the next generation of the internet, the next generation of the enterprise networks. And for other providers that don't have that capability and their boards may not be wanting to buy in because they can have API to API control and they can control this as a wholesale platform. It's good for them as well and this incredible amount of interest. And that's been wonderful to see. But also for us, it allows us even better unity economics because it's scale and it wouldn't it be wonderful for a telco to be a hyperscaler as well for networking.
Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (15:51):
Be careful what you wish for. Colin, thank you very much for being with me today.
Colin Bannon, BT Business (15:55):
Thank you.
Tony Poulos here at FutureNet World 2025 in London. And today I have with me Colin Bannon, who is the CTO of BT business. Colin, welcome.
Colin Bannon, BT Business (00:14):
Hello, Tony.
Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (00:16):
Earlier today in your presentation in part of a panel, you raised the point about enterprise level and coming from an enterprise level, there seems to be a value gap between services rendered and value received. What did you mean by that?
Colin Bannon, BT Business (00:31):
Well, I was actually referring to industry as a whole around the importance of communications and networking. Today, more than ever, the network is actually part of the operational resilience. And I think the challenge with industry is that our narrative is kind of let that be forgotten and kind of leave the network up to the procurement managers rather than the C-suite. When they think about operational resilience, they need to be thinking about network as part of that. And when you have ai, it's part of the computer. So I think really what I was talking about is the industry challenge as a whole to make networking cool again, bring network back to the fore because really without the network, you look at any major multinational business today without the network running, there's really no plan B.
Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (01:27):
You also made the point that cloud service providers are adding value to their services and telcos aren't. What did you mean by that?
Colin Bannon, BT Business (01:35):
Well, that was again, part of the conversation we were having around the narrative is that I do think the cloud service providers in their narrative have been able to attach their services closer to the business outcomes of the customer than the network providers. But today, more than ever, and what's been brilliant in the last year that I've found that even the cloud service providers, their business model previously had been to disrupt the network service providers and say, oh yeah, just buy cloud and don't worry about the network. But now all of the cloud service providers, when they think about an end-to-end SLA, an end-to-end outcome of that application journey, it absolutely includes the network and they're saying the network matters, which is a great place to be. It feels like a real turning this year of a recognition of operational resiliences is absolute and you cannot think about it. And having the hyperscalers really leaning in now, really entering the dialogue, thinking holistically end to end is great for us because we can have more valuable conversations, greater solutions for our customers and better brilliant outcomes.
Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (02:44):
Well, you talked about network and of course I'd like to know what network as a service means to your customers.
Colin Bannon, BT Business (02:50):
Yeah, absolutely. Well, if you think about it, it's really about the platformization of our portfolio and the technology behind it that actually allows it to be transferred. In the past. You think about products and platforms, the way telcos have built them before they've been inorganic. You had internet at one point, you had MPLS at another time, you had Elan, Eline. All the different technologies have evolved at different periods of time. Most of them are all still used, but because they were built at different times, they were built on different platforms. And the way we used to build things was very tightly vertically aligned. Product teams and system stacks, they were hard to break apart. But if you think about a modern customer, they want choice and they also want agility. And actually cutting those very tightly built stovepipes down and turning them horizontal in terms of shared capabilities is a mammoth task, but absolutely required by our customers. And for BT to be able to go at the pace of our customers of what they need, the agility in this world that is changing faster than ever, building a network as a service is really, really important, which we've undertook. You will see a thing what we call global fabric internationally and in the UK we're building UK fabric.
Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (04:14):
Well, that brings me to the point about to what extent does having a telco platform like BT's Global Fabric enable autonomous network operations, and what difference does that make to the day-to-day operation?
Colin Bannon, BT Business (04:26):
It makes a huge difference in terms of outcomes from a customer. I've already talked, agility obviously is the first one. Flexibility is second one for our customer's experience. If you think about they want choice, they want to be able to blend products together, having them on a single platform or being able to change from one to another and not being locked in is really important to this because they need to be able to move and they need partners that are relevant to deal with. The challenges that are upcoming. Behind the scenes of course, is you need platforms that are agile, and as you build a single platform, you actually need to have your inventory correct. And the inventory is really important because in the way we built these stovepipe platforms previously, and in the case of Global Fabric, it's ellan, eline, internet and MPLS, you had different teams that were working along to reenter the data at different processes of the workflow and they would clean the data, they would fix it.
(05:30):
Humans would do that. Now as you have a single autonomous flow and a single platform that is fully automated and fully orchestrated, you actually need to get that data right at the start. So that's really important. And anybody who perhaps in the past the telco has said that they don't have somewhere in the back of the system right now using a spreadsheet, some human doing that is they're probably lying. And that's why it's really important to get this so that humans don't get in the way of the speed that people need the business outcomes. And we need to have a more cloud-like approach on platforms that you can scale and scale is really important and continue to innovate on. And these platforms that we're building now, we only do this once every 15 years. This platform that we're building now will need to be able to continue to innovate in a cost efficient way, in an ability to allow us to bring new features and new products onto our platforms for the next 10 to 15 years.
Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (06:33):
Can the development of telco platforms such as BTS Global Fabric for example, actually help with B2B customers engagement and to meet the needs of enterprises?
Colin Bannon, BT Business (06:43):
Well, that's the killer question, isn't it? The thing that keeps me up at night, there's two things, maybe three. One is operational resilience. I mean, as I've said before, there is no plan B without the network. It's hugely important. We are part of the computer now. We're part of the operational processes. So whatever we do, the network can not stop. It's got to be there and it provides such a critical value. VT is very honored to help run national critical infrastructures, health services, emergency services, hospitals, air traffic controls, logistics companies, all these use cases that are going that if you didn't have the network work, really, really bad things would happen. We're conscious of the souls that are on board of the planes that we're helping support, and it is a really great responsibility. That's number one in how we build national critical infrastructure. The second one is being relevant, building stuff that is relevant for our emerging customer's needs the world and technology is moving faster than ever.
(07:52):
I hate to say it the word it's been said a few times today at the conference. AI is driving great disruption in the market. Geopolitics is also driving great disruption emerging and cyber threats are going greater. So all of these things we need to be building. And the whole reason the Reon Detra of why we built global fabric was to be able to have a platform that is both commercially flexible but also something that really starts to address things like sovereignty. Think of a world where you will have sovereignty extending beyond data at rest and think about data in motion. The internet was built in a time, it's a beautiful thing. It is, but it was built to survive a nuclear war as part of it, but it is geographically ignorant. So when you start to think about regulators or thinking about sovereignty and data in motion, how do you envision, how do you imagine the next version of the internet that actually allows sovereignty to be part of that?
(09:06):
Because overlay services for the last number of years, sass e SD wan, they can't solve for it inherently. You need a programmable underlay fabric that you can take a business intent and inject that by abstracting the path controller and the data plane. So you have and then creating a language of intent into the path controller to allow you to have fine-grained microservices control in the wide area network. So essentially what you're taking is the WAN is the new lan. So what you had in the data center lan, which was infinite capacity, the ability to scale up, the ability to control have east West control and north South, you're extending that out now into the wide area network is a really exciting time. But that allows you new things that you've never thought about and emerging challenges for our customers to solve for that we've never been able to solve before.
Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (10:03):
And what does BT strategic focus in the UK market mean for the future of the global fabric platform? We talked about
Colin Bannon, BT Business (10:11):
Well, scale is everything and we are doubling down on extending our intellectual capital into the UK networks. Now it goes without saying that BT has great investment in the deep parts of the uk, K, the ducks, the fiber, the wholesale networks. There are significant assets that are in the uk. Some of it is regulated and highly regulated and some of it is deregulated. But either way, there are everything. It's safe to say that sophisticated corporations, big corporations running really important challenges have the same challenges about cloud, about security, about agility, about economics, about lock-in in the UK as they do internationally. There is no difference there. And it would be the height of folly to think that that's different. What may be different is to take all the brilliant parts that we've already learned and apply it. And by the way, global Fabric is in the uk, but we're applying it to additional infrastructure in the UK to essentially then leverage even more around the additional assets that we have in the uk.
(11:30):
So it's that plus, which is really exciting to also continue to learn because this is a journey that we've been learning both in how we build portfolio, how we do development, how we leverage ai, how we leverage architectures. And it's a platform evolution that we're going. And this is just another evolution and we have our new CEO, John James has come in who has a very bold vision for winning in the UK market and global fabric and the UK fabric part of that, the assets of what we've already developed is absolutely applicable for the UK and a super exciting journey for what we're doing there.
Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (12:15):
And will that be extended? Will the platform be extended to partners for example?
Colin Bannon, BT Business (12:18):
Well, as I said on stage two things that we've learned, one is that there's segments of the market that we're not necessarily interested in. A managed network service offering from bt, you might call them DIYers, you may call them large sophisticated customers who may want to do it all and they just buy little bits. Now the relationship that I spent a lot of time with him I may have had with the CIO and one of those organizations before was, well, I'd like to work with UBT, but normally how we contract you would take over my teams. And so in a way, it got in the way our relationship got in the way of doing amazing things because there was all or nothing option. And when they did deal with us, they would do a unbundled option with just wires only as a term and then they would build all their stuff on top.
(13:18):
This fundamentally changes it now that we're a platform company, is that we're not a threat anymore on the value added services side. So they can have all the benefits that they can consume as a platform now and it's not a threat. So what's been really surprising and pleasantly surprising is the DIY segment. So what we're seeing is growth interest from other channels than just our direct sales team, but also people wanting to come to the platform itself and transact directly, have control, have this sort of pre quotes and the ability to transact and much greater control as a platform, which is great. And the other aspect to the partners is obviously we are committed to standards bodies like the meth and the TM form and it is incumbent on us to deliver better outcomes for our collective customers to be transparent to each other and to be able to carry business intent across that.
(14:19):
So that involves, and just like the GSMA with the CAMA alliance and others is standardizing gives all of us a form of scale. It may take a little more effort out the front part, but it's worth the effort at the backend because not only that, particularly if vendors start to conform as well, our overall cost to serve go down and the outcomes for our customers go up and the assurance of these things go up on that side as well. And being able to transact. What we've been really pleasantly surprised is as a platform, again, it's not just the DIYers that this becomes quite an interesting platform as a wholesale because not everybody else is willing to invest in the core network transformation to be a full nas. A lot of people are nibbling around the edges, but BT is actually leaned in and are really committed to building the next generation of the internet, the next generation of the enterprise networks. And for other providers that don't have that capability and their boards may not be wanting to buy in because they can have API to API control and they can control this as a wholesale platform. It's good for them as well and this incredible amount of interest. And that's been wonderful to see. But also for us, it allows us even better unity economics because it's scale and it wouldn't it be wonderful for a telco to be a hyperscaler as well for networking.
Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (15:51):
Be careful what you wish for. Colin, thank you very much for being with me today.
Colin Bannon, BT Business (15:55):
Thank you.
Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.
Colin Bannon, CTO, BT Business
BT Business CTO Colin Bannon explains why a programmable, scalable network-as-a-service (NaaS) telco platform is needed to meet the modern demands of enterprise users, and discusses how BT is developing a “UK fabric” to meet the specific needs of British business-to-business (B2B) customers.
Recorded May 2025
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