BT’s Matthew Allcoat walks us through digital transformation, focusing on achieving financial and operational goals, maintaining quality of service throughout, and a reminder of why we’re doing all this stuff.

In the previous Inform article based on his smash-hit presentation at TM Forum Live! Asia in Singapore, Matthew Allcoat, Chief Architect, Asia, Middle East and Africa, BT Global Services, explored where companies should start their digital transformations. Here he explains what to do, why and how, including some critical success factors that are typically barely mentioned.

The case for evolution

A hybrid existence: Like most people in the communications industry, Allcoat insists that evolution is the only sensible way forward, saying, “We support hybridization, but you should be able to support your physical and virtual assets in exactly the same way. If you are opening a lot more sites, then you should be able to make changes to all the sites simulataneously no matter whether they have a physical or virtual implemenation. They should have the same operational look and feel. It’s key and possible, and something we’re helping our customers to do. Then things like inventory management become much easier.

“Lots of people are making big migrations to the cloud, but even among large enterprises with a lot of people working on them, I’ve yet to see someone do it 100 percent.”

Sweating assets makes financial and operational sense: As the hybrid model is likely to be in place for the next three or four years, it’s important companies understand it and Allcoat stressed, “You can sweat those physical assets to the very end. There is no reason why you can’t have an environment with physical appliances for things like voice capabilities or voice gateways and logical appliances until they are fully depreciated. Then you can get them off your books in a positive and efficient way on the balance sheet – you’ve made that CapEx to OpEx transformation without writing off any assets.”

Virtualizing is not just replacing the physical, it’s doing things differently: Allcoat noted that, "As you move from the physical model to virtual, we tend to say ‘We’re virtualizing a server, doing something with VMware’. I mean much more than that. You used buy, say, a Cisco router with a suite of features, but now that will change more dramatically to us using assets on a per user, per flow basis."

This has all sorts of consequences, for example, regarding procurement and operations, is there is a more flexible licensing option, so companies can more closely relate the cost base of an asset and its economic activities/potential?

There will always be some physical assets: We will probably never get rid of every little box, nor would we want to because in some instances, they are the best option -- for example, where particularly high throughput is needed. This too is why hybridization is so important.

Allcoat cautioned, “Don’t lose sight of the goal and become distracted by the noise as you go along the hybrid journey”.

Financial and operational impacts

People – BT is going for a program of recruitment, education and training because the skills people and the business need will change. An engineer who’s used to dealing with boxes and wires needs to be more like a software programmer. Being a designer is in this world is very different when we are talking a lot about generic hardware running virtualized network functions – it all becomes much easier, but very different.

Operations – if we’re running transient networks that are created on demand for a specfic purpose then torn down when no longer required, that network might have a lifespan of an hour. How do you run a business based on entities that don’t exist for long? It makes the operate space more complicated.

Guaranteeing quality of service, which Allcoat defines as, “What you offer from your IT organization and vendors to your customers.” He continues, “The things we’re seeing from our global Cloud of Clouds (read the in-depth case study here) are all based on the concept of being a cloud services integrator to offer an app-like experience.

Companies need to think ahead to how a CSI will provide that app-like experience to run your core business process for them, once they’ve passed the stages of sweating physical assets and moving into almost entirely virtual world.

The enabler becomes the business: “One word of warning; there is a risk, going through this transformation, that it explodes. In the past, the cyber or information world was like a window into your company to see what was happening in HR or payroll or to monitor processes as they executed. But now, and this will be more true the further you go down this road, the technology that used to provide the window is now your business,” Allcoat cautioned.

Implications for the business: If you’re a car manufacturer and you can cause a car to be made and delivered by virtual means, you are also opening up a new attack vector on your enterprise that probably wasn’t there before. As Allcoat said, “So, on the theme of guaranteeing quality of service and business continuity through this transformation, as you go down this road, understand and very clearly, what intruders into your systems might be able to do. What would it mean if they could divert traffic from one place to another or if they could trigger an industrial process?”

Advanced analytics for security: Allcoat said BT has an advanced cyber platform which is used to defend nation states and critical national infrastructure, plus large banks and other organizations. It’s basically a very large data analytics platform that looks beyond firewalls and other security measures, at happenings in the world at large, including non-IT, physical activity and what it means to flows of data, and what’s going in and out.

In conclusion

While some people worry that virtualization, automation, artifical intelligence and other digital world trends mean the machines are taking over, Allcoat reminded us, “Actually, people decide what’s going to happen. This is just a better, faster, slicker way of making things happen – the digital possible. It’s different in every industry, but the hybrid journey combined with security are common factors.”

He added, “In the digital age, people aren’t just users, they are in the driving seat. The real importance of digital to business is not the emergence of new technology, it’s the empowering of people – employees, customers or consumers – to do amazing things.

“Whether it’s the sharing economy, our always on lifestyle or the consumerisation of IT, everyone wants agility, flexibility and speed from their IT, without compromising on security.

They want art and science, that is, people and technology coming together in a creative way. We call this the digital possible – the amazing potential of digital to change not just businesses, but also communities, nations and the wider world.”