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Michael Boustridge

Enabling a More Collaborative World

Editors’ Note

Michael Boustridge joined BT Global Services in April 2007, assuming responsibility for all aspects of BT’s operations and performance in the United States and Canada. He also manages BT Professional Services and BT Global Financial Services globally and has a coordinating role within BT’s Asia Pacific region. Prior to this appointment, Boustridge was Vice President, Sales and Marketing, at EDS, where he was instrumental in achieving the company’s highest total contract value for new business signings in five years. Concurrently, Boustridge ran EDS’s Agility Alliance Program to align partners with EDS’s strategic roadmap for competitive advantage. A native New Zealander, Boustridge joined EDS in 1996 from Hitachi Data Systems, and worked at IBM earlier in his career.

Company Brief

BT Group (www.btplc.com) is one of the world’s leading providers of communications solutions and services. One of four BT business units, BT Global Services employs around 30,000 people in 70 countries and delivers services in 170 countries, helping multinational, multisite organizations to master the complexity of business communication. In the United States, where the company has had a presence since 1988, BT employs more than 4,300 people and provides a range of solutions for multinational enterprises, including convergence, security, mobility, contact center services, and IT outsourcing and transformation.

Are you happy with the current strength of BT Americas’ business? What is your outlook for growth over the next year?

We’re very happy with where the business is currently positioned. In the last quarter, we grew about 20 percent. Our strategy for North America – based on being the business operator for our customers, providing mission critical network services to optimize global IT performance – seems to have market resonance. Being a software services company and applying software services on top of the network is taking hold. Our strength in security is also getting good traction. We’re seeing a lot of growth from multinational customers with operations in and out of America. It has been an interesting transition moving to BT from my sales and marketing position at EDS. I really enjoyed working at EDS. However, my current position is much different due to my broader set of responsibilities – for the overall operations, customer satisfaction, and integration of acquisitions, just to mention a few – and especially with my responsibility for the overall growth and strength of BT in the region going forward.

How broad is your target market?

Our sweet spot is serving multinational, multisite customers that operate in and out of America. Put simply, we focus on providing and managing networking solutions so customers can focus on their core business. This allows our customers to concentrate their efforts on their own mission critical operations and on their customers. We can deliver in areas from consulting to networking to fully managed IT services, from IT optimization to customer relationship management, from managed security services to mobility.

We also have a target market around basic networks. Anything that has a local or wide area network, anything that has lots of circuits or lots of complexity, anything that’s moving toward Voice over IP – they are all part of this market. We can manage all of that technology and its associated applications.

In this competitive industry, services can sound very similar from company to company. How do you differentiate?

It’s about more than the network. It’s about how customers merge their core business and applications with a core network infrastructure that has true global reach, and true global presence and capability. We match our competitors’ network capability, but where they stop is where we start to differentiate ourselves. We provide consultancy and advice on how to manage the solution application. We take on the customers’ infrastructure and operate it, so we become core to them. And we work with all the third parties to make sure the applications work seamlessly over the infrastructure.

From a different point of view, we have global depth and strength and we own and operate a truly global infrastructure. We know how to design and operate global business models in more than 170 countries, which is much different than being a national carrier with some multinational interests – we’re truly global.

How will the development of Unified Communications and Collaboration [UCC] affect BT’s range of offerings?

UCC is still in its infancy. BT is working with both Cisco and Microsoft, which are the leaders in this space. We expect that UCC will grow exponentially in the next couple of years and that it will be a very big platform. We’re well positioned to capitalize on that growth, because UCC enables users to communicate and collaborate with anyone at any time. It involves e-mail, instant messaging, and other applications in the networking area, and pulls them all together. Given the traditional services we offer and the new developments like UCC, we’re on the leading edge.

Do you have an important focus on corporate social responsibility activities?

Absolutely. In fact, in February, we launched a solar energy panel project at our BT Americas’ headquarters site in El Segundo, California. At that building, the employee parking lot is predominantly south-facing, and we’ve installed industry-leading solar panels to cover the entire car park. The solar system produces about 20 percent of the energy requirements for our building, where we have a very large data center. And more importantly, it reduces our carbon emissions by 960,000 metric tons, equivalent to powering about 150 homes per year. His Royal Highness Prince Andrew came over and helped launch this project with us.

It’s amazing how involved our employees are in corporate social responsibility. Because BT cares so much about reducing emissions, we encourage home working. We promote desktop technology that enables employees to perform more effectively and efficiently and also achieve a better balance between work and home life, which makes a huge difference to our employees.