30 01732 759725 CONNECTIVITY Investing in partners Gavin Jones, Channel Director at BT Wholesale, talks to Technology Reseller about connectivity, the ever growing demand for bandwidth and the opportunities for channel partners BT had a busy first half of the year. It continued to invest in fibre and 5G as part of a £3.7 billion annual investment in its network, it rolled out its first EE wholesale offering, and it encouraged partners to continue the transition to All IP to reap the benefits sooner. “The second half of the year will see more of the same,” said BT Wholesale Channel Director Gavin Jones, when Technology Reseller met up with him in the summer. At the time, BT Wholesale had just released research showing that 75% of IT decision-makers want to upgrade their technology, with 61% planning to invest in AI in the next 12 months. In the same survey, around two thirds of employees said they needed faster (65%) and more reliable (71%) connectivity. These findings highlight the growing and evolving demand for communications and connectivity, driven and enabled by the ongoing roll-out of full fibre and 5G and emerging technologies like AI. “Imagine when all the UK’s 25 million homes or premises are connected with fibre and each one can have 1 gigabit or more if they want. That’s going to create a phenomenal amount of usage and requirements. That’s why we’re always investing for the future,” said Jones. This investment includes helping channel partners to meet the more complex communications and connectivity requirements of a hybrid workforce in which 70% of people are no longer tethered to a desk; to accelerate the move to All IP – “About 50% of people are on cloud voice, so there’s a lot still to change over,” said Jones; and to give partners the resources and support they need to prosper. Examples of the latter range from white label marketing collateral and battle cards to product deep dives, where partners can ask about specific products, and events covering things like social selling on LinkedIn and developments in AI. Opportunities in AI AI is a good example of how emerging technologies are influencing BT Wholesale’s product offering – and opportunities for partners. “The use cases for AI aren’t fully defined yet, but we are confident high bandwidth is going to be their bedrock, so really doubling down on our capacity, doubling down on availability, allowing people to have superfast connections is core to what we’re doing, alongside investments in broadband and 5G. We expect demand for bandwidth from businesses and communication providers to grow exponentially.” To support this requirement, BT Wholesale recently launched 400 gigabit services for service providers. These have also attracted interest from enterprises looking to mirror data centres or change their topology to optimise their use of public cloud and private cloud. “We started looking at 400 gigabits probably about 12-18 months ago. We took our first order a year ago, and the demand is starting to increase. Someone said to me the other day that 400 gig is the new 100 gig. We just think data will go up. You can see it with Ethernet; most Ethernet circuits used to be sold at 100 Megabit. Now most are sold at 1 gigabit and large enterprises are taking 10 gigabits.” The need for speed Jones calls this ‘the need for speed’, and it is impacting all areas of business technology, not just emerging ones like AI. “Everything uses more data and consistently more data. Applications are becoming more complex, they’re more data-hungry and they particularly require far better latency. Some won’t work if there’s not a certain speed, like unified comms where you have to have a certain level of service for a call or a video call over IP. All this and the exponential rise in the number of video calls and video conferences over the last three or four years is coming together to drive the need for bandwidth, which requires a better network and a faster network,” said Jones. “When it comes to AI, there’s definitely more demand from people that are actually involved in AI, shipping data backwards and forwards between data centres, and there’s definitely more demand for things like submarine cables and landing. We will also see that in the enterprise as they start to adopt AI.” Telco to tech-co Jones says that the emergence of new applications and demand for higher bandwidth requires partners to adopt a different approach when engaging with customers. “The nature of the channel is changing from the really old model of ‘I can sell you a mobile phone, I can sell you calls, I can sell you internet access’ to a more unified landscape with the rise of Microsoft Teams, the rise of hosted communications, the rise of M365. Gavin Jones
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