BT Global
Services will next month sign a long-term, multi-million pound
deal to outsource all the routine IT work that it has picked up as
part of its managed services business.
The firm presently manages global and local networked
applications for 420 global firms such as
Unilever,
Procter & Gamble and
Reuters, 16,000 mid-sized
companies, and 620,000 small and medium-sized firms.
Speaking at an exclusive briefing in Montreux, Switzerland,
ahead of BT's annual general meeting tomorrow, BT Global Services
CEO Francois Barrault said full details of the project, one of the
biggest IT outsourcing contracts in the UK, would be announced next
month.
He said BT had whittled down 600 potential partners to one final
choice. However, BT would continue to take responsibility for some
300,000 lines in 136 countries for its customers.
Barrault said the deal reflected BT Global Services' own
philosophy. "We all have to decide what's core and what's non-core
in our operations," he said. "When times are good, you want to own
everything when things get harder, you reappraise what is your core
business."
The news came as BT Global Service announced it had installed
its 10,000th data communications line for the Reuters news
organisation, and
renewed a five-year, £325m contract with Procter & Gamble,
the US soap and groceries maker.
Barrault revealed that the firm is developing a knowledge
management system to enable it to store organisational
knowledge.
In its present form, BT Global Services is using a social
networking interface to a
Siebel back-end system
to collect, store and make available details on large accounts.
These include key account representatives, meeting and incident
records.
Barrault said the aim was to improve the service it could
provide to key clients, especially if key staff changed. "It will
also help us to remove the emotion when things go wrong, because it
will help us to be pro-active in identifying potential problems and
raising them with customers before they become serious," he
said.
Originally planned for internal use, customer response has
already indicated a wider market potential, he said.