The sustainable growth strategy

Trudy Norris-Grey, BT Wholesale's managing director of strategy and transformation, is still a couple of months away from celebrating her first year at BT. The former president of Sun Microsystems in the UK and Ireland successfully led the transformation of that business before joining BT Wholesale. Now her task is to ensure that BT Wholesale has a clear long-term strategy for sustainable growth.

The communications industry is undergoing fundamental change. It's moving from traditional telecoms to next generation services provision. It is a challenging task that is made even trickier in today's economic climate.

The cold reality is that weak businesses will struggle and fall by the wayside. That said, strong businesses will have the opportunity to get stronger. And that is BT Wholesale's plan; to capitalise on the opportunities that will confirm its position as the leading next generation solutions provider to the communications industry.

Trudy Norris-Grey "We are here to enable our customers to bridge the traditional and next generation worlds," says Norris-Grey. "By leveraging our world-class capabilities, innovation, investments and economies of scale we can help our customers renew their businesses for a new future."

The signs are good. BT Wholesale has already firmly established itself as a credible and trustworthy partner with significant long-term strategic contracts signed with many of the market's leading communications providers. And it has introduced its next-generation broadband and Ethernet services.

Indeed, BT Wholesale's continued focus on winning big Managed Network Services deals and on maintaining its base business creates the firm foundation on which its business can grow. It is continually developing its services and solutions portfolio to meet the changing requirements of its customers and, in turn, their customers, particularly as 21CN comes on stream.

BT Wholesale's current strategic focus is four-fold:

Interoperability - BT Wholesale is managing the movement of traffic from traditional telephony to new IP networks, which includes the challenge of moving from telephone numbers to IP addresses.
Content - BT Wholesale is focusing on initiatives to manage multimedia and video over broadband. This includes boosting the efficient delivery of video content and ultimately the delivery of broadcast content over broadband.
Mobility - In the mobile sector, BT Wholesale is enabling its mobile customers to manage their investment in new network technology efficiently and cost-effectively, while helping them extract added-value from new applications.
Expanding today's business - As well as breaking out into new territory, BT Wholesale is helping its existing customers grow their broadband penetration and is introducing ways for its customers to better address their business customers, and in parallel is seeking new markets for its existing services.

If wholesalers are to be really successful in the future converged world, they need to do things once, on an expandable, service-agnostic platform that is both capital and operationally efficient. And BT Wholesale is doing just that – it is intent on developing a platform-based business, creating re-usable capabilities to create the innovative products demanded by its customers and their end users.

With its position in the marketplace, BT Wholesale has the opportunity to lead the commercial exploitation of web 2.0 services. By bringing together the best that communications, IT, software and applications providers can offer it plans to beat the forefront to revolutionise the end-user experience.

Norris-Grey says: "BT Wholesale is a big strong brand. We know our business extraordinarily well. The IT industry thinks that the telco space is its space. We disagree. More and more we believe it's about what we can do in the ICT market."

Even in these difficult economic times, BT Wholesale is driving hard for growth by focusing its efforts directly on its customers' needs - now, and in the future. This is just the start and it's going to be challenging. But BT Wholesale believes it is laying firm foundations for sustainable growth for itself and its customers.

"The good news is that our strategy is already being enhanced, it's being sold and it's being asked for," concludes Norris-Grey. "Everyone within BT Wholesale recognises the challenge facing us - and we're up for it."