BT Inks Deal With AWS For Its Global Services Division

BT, in an effort to reinvent itself as a digital business, has signed a new partnership with AWS, focused on its Global Services division. The company describes this deal as a milestone.

For what it calls its Cloud of Clouds portfolio strategy.

The idea is to provide enterprises the ability to ramp up their adoption of cloud-based services, with a special emphasis on areas like networking, security and managed cloud services. According to the company, the vast majority of its global customers are working with the Amazon Web Services platform.

Neil Sutton, the vice president of strategy and strategic alliances at Global Services said BT plans to help its customers navigate complex networking issues that AWS can’t on its own.

Case in point when a cable is dug up, or an issue arises due to a datacenter outage.

The telecom giant does maintain that it has not picked AWS over Azure, because its Cloud of Clouds platform is agnostic. It already works with Microsoft, and is open to signing a similar deal with Azure, as its business evolves.

Global Services has been, for several years now, on shaky ground

There have been longstanding rumors that its parent company was looking to sell the division. In fact, earlier this year BT announced that it was letting go of 4,000 jobs in the next two years, with the majority of them expected to be from Global Services.

The shake-up follows an accounting scandal at the Italian segment of Global Services that cost BT more than £500 million.

No details on what kind of impact this new cloud direction would have on the business of Global Services, or even the layoffs.

Sutton declined to comment on the what impact the cloud strategy would have on the Global Services business, or the job cuts. But at the end of the day, this is another little achievement for AWS.

Good stuff.