Ramji rings changes at BT

BT axed 30,000 staff last year and recently received a bashing from the Conservatives and ISPs regarding the Digital Britain broadband tax that it would receive to fund broadband rollout, with the Tories pledging to scrap the levy if they get into power.

However in a recent interview with Computing, BT CIO Al-Noor Ramji was relentlessly upbeat about the organisation’s future.

Convergence
One transformation that Ramji has in his focus is industry wide, and that is the convergence of hardware and software in the network. The hardware, comprising switches and routers from companies such as Cisco, is currently being replaced by ordinary servers that can manage the whole network via software.

The roles of CIO and CTO within BT were merged into one in 2007 to reflect this trend.

“Traditionally a telco would have a CIO in charge of software and a CTO in charge of networks, but we didn’t think this was necessary any longer,” he said.

Fibre deployments accelerate this surge to software and where fibre to the premises [FTTP] is installed – and BT plans to roll it out to one million homes by December this year – connections can be managed remotely by computer, which means a totally changed role for the network experts.

And Ramji argues that this move to software is a welcome one: “A telco spends five times as much on a network as on software and so we will be reducing our outlay significantly.” However, as he explained the profits made by software companies deploying network services are less grand than those made by traditional hardware suppliers, with HP seeing margins of less than 30 per cent compared with Cisco’s margins of 64 per cent.

The purchase last November of 3Com by HP is testament to this convergence – a non-specialist HP blade server would now be able to manage 3Com’s network where once a specialist switch or router would have been required.

Ramji argues that the driver for this trend is cloud computing: “We have seen the virtualisation of computing power, storage, and now there is network virtualisation too. Before long you won’t be able to tell the difference between any of these three bits. They’ll all be hosted on a laptop.”

Big projects
Since Ramji took over the reins in 2004, three of the biggest projects he has worked on are the rollout of the 21CN network; the Right First Time project; and more recently BT’s Software Development Kit (SDK).

The 21CN rollout was completed last year, providing a global, real-time open platform, based on internet protocol, with all the key mechanisms in the software layer.

The Right First Time programme was set up last year to improve customer service. BT deployed common APIs across all systems and departments to be able to track the passage of a customer call. It also needed to be able to monitor a call/customer request taking place between itself and other companies if customers were switching services.

The Software Development Kit (SDK) comprises a number of applications that are either created by BT or other developers and run via the BT network. This project is about one-third complete, but Ramji is keen to get the word out. “Not many people are as aware of this service as I would like,” he said. “We want as many companies and developers to be involved in adding to and utilising the SDK as possible.”

BT is also linking with other companies such as Salesforce.com, and currently provides its applications to Salesforce as part of the latter’s App Exchange service.

This is not a service traditionally offered by telcos, but several modern software companies are in this space. You can extend APIs on Google, and Amazon offers a storage solution (S3) as well as the Elastic Cloud 2 (EC2) application development service.

Ramji said: “We still face challenges though, and one of the biggest is that of cultural change. The network guys are going to have to face up to the fact that if they don’t start understanding software they’re going to be out of a job. But as a software guy in charge of replacing network hardware, I guess that for the time being, my job’s pretty safe.”