BT 2014 Annual Report Download - page 30

27
The Strategic Report
Delivering our strategy
Delivering our strategy
This year we have
• delivered the multicast capability to support the addition of BT Sport
and our other channels to our T service
• improved our UK broadband network  optimising it to cater for
increases in trac and improving its tolerance to faults while reducing
the incremental running cost of bandwidth
• started to develop a mobile capability that will enable our lines of
business to launch products with our MNO partner (EE), and oer
services using our own 4G spectrum
• rationalised our voice and legacy data networks so that we are
using less equipment and consuming less energy
• increased the number of IP Connect PoPs by 13 and Ethernet Connect
PoPs by seven
• expanded our network into sub-Saharan Africa, Malaysia and South
East Asia by deploying new network-to-network interfaces (NNIs).
These help us serve the multinational corporations that operate in
these regions and
• extended our global cloud contact platform to atin America and
South Africa, supporting global brands such as Tesco.
Platforms
Our platforms are the processes and technology that deliver our products
and services. They are critical to running our business.
For example, the BT Sport channels are distributed over our T platform.
It takes our sports content and converts it to a format suitable for
viewing on a T, laptop or smart device. It then transmits it over our
broadband network, the UKs digital terrestrial T network and Skys
satellite platform. Our T platform also includes the BT Sport ordering,
monitoring, fault management and billing systems.
As we have brought in new technologies and won outsourced contracts
with major customers, the number of platforms we manage has grown.
We shut down those we no longer need, moving our customers onto our
strategic systems, such as our MPS platform. For example, this year
we closed our legacy Infonet platform and migrated more than 500
corporate customers on to our global MPS platform. This reduced our
costs and means we can provide a better service.
We are making our platforms simpler, more reliable and cheaper to run.
And we are continuing to innovate. Capitalising on our research activity,
we have implemented a production platform to analyse Big Data.
This will allow us to manage our own internal data better and get
greater insight into market trends.
We are working to reduce the number of data centres we run,
despite the increasing amount of capacity we need. We are doing this by
decommissioning older server technology, using fewer IT applications
and using server virtualisation and our own Enterprise Cloud technology.
This, and other programmes, will help us cut our IT energy use over the
coming years.
Properties
We occupy around 6,350 properties in the UK and 1,740 in the rest of
the world.
Most of our UK properties are owned by and leased from Telereal
Trillium, part of the William Pears Group. 95% of our UK properties
are telephone exchanges housing telecoms and broadband equipment.
The rest consist of our oces, customer contact centres, engineering
depots, data centres, and our new BT Sport studios at ere East in the
Queen Eliabeth Olympic Park.
The BT Sport studio space is one of the largest ED-lit studios in the
world. aving contracted for the provision of a low-carbon heating and
cooling system across the site, BT Sport has demonstrated its sustainable
credentials from the outset.
Outside the UK, 93% of our buildings are operational, housing our
hosting and telecoms equipment. As part of our strategy of investing in
the high-growth regions, this year we opened oces in Kuala umpur,
Jakarta, Mumbai and Singapore and entered into an agreement to lease
a new oce in Kolkata. We also opened new data hosting facilities in Asia
and atin America. In total, we opened 25 new properties outside the UK.
We continue to drive our cost transformation programme of
consolidating oce space and vacating and disposing of oce and
operational premises that we no longer need. In the UK, we closed four
large data centres in the year and disposed of a number of redundant
telecoms buildings. Outside the UK, we disposed of 35 legacy sites.