In the NXTcomm spotlight: Matt Beal, BT Global Services
By Dan O'Shea
Jun 19, 2007 12:00 AM
BT’s 21st Century Network project is well under way, but it still has about four years to go, which attests to the sheer scale of the network upgrade and integration challenge the U.K. carrier has taken on. Telephony’s Dan O’Shea recently spoke with Matt Beal, who is in charge of the 21CN project for BT, about the project’s scope, the company’s new test bed and how the 21CN project has stayed on course through recent management changes.
On the massive scope and status of the 21CN project: To compare and contrast what we have been able to do to date, you have to start with the knowledge that the 21CN has as its objective to integrate 16 single-service networks into one multiservice network. Some of these 16 networks were specific to the types of customers they served and others to specific lines of business. We have made quite a bit of progress, but there is still a long way to go. It’s absolutely been challenging along the way, but our vendor selection process was robust. This whole process occasionally involves us prodding competitors to work together, but that’s to be expected. We have wonderful, awful rows in private, but it won’t affect our ability to deliver on the project’s goals.
On BT’s recent unveiling of its 21CN testbed: For our On the Night testbed, we wanted the environment to be as close to our real network environment as possible. It’s allowing us to see how everything will come together. So, it’s really a national physical infrastructure and not to be confused with the lab testing that has been going on the last year or so. That was really lab validation to make sure the pieces of equipment we were investing in worked as advertised. The name On the Night comes from the idea that when we make the network cutover to a single multiservice network, it will happen on one night.
On recent management changes at BT: The changes to the corporate structure that we are going through now go along with what we’re doing with the 21CN, which will be the network that supports it all. These changes will have more of a long-term effect. The new organizational structure is happening gradually, and that will take a while to operate slickly. The network project is four years away from being completed, so you won’t see the network now enabling a lot of the synergy of the new structure, but it will do that in the future.
On whether these shifts affect the 21CN project: There are thousands of people around the world who are involved in this. When there are organizational changes, we do have to manage those, but it doesn’t change how our project gets managed. Yet, we do have plans in place to improve how we’re managing this project. Those changes are not material enough to get more specific about them at this stage. A lot of them are just the daily lessons that we learn. It’s a dynamic project, and there are changes all the time. The important thing is to keep managing to the project’s objectives.
