Google Cloud and BT have today announced a strategic, five-year partnership to accelerate BT’s digital transformation, bolstering data and AI capabilities
The collaboration will involve BT utilising Google Cloud products and services — including cloud infrastructure, machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), data analytics, security, and API management.
By embarking on the digital transformation project through its BT Digital unit, the telecoms company looks to improve customer experience, while reducing costs and risk, as well as building new revenue streams.
The initiative includes creating a group-wide data and AI fabric as part of its cloud-first and AI-first strategy.
Centred around driving business outcomes, the use of AI and deep ML across the organisation will allow businesses and customers to make more data-led decisions, as well as creating deeper personalisation for customer offerings and new go-to-market propositions.
Additionally, BT will be able to have real-time network analytics on hand for a more enhanced customer service, through predictive fault management and assurance.
Google’s Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team, meanwhile, will partner with BT to foster a continuous delivery and “zero ops” autonomous operations culture, to accelerate product development and innovation as part of a new culture of working that BT calls “The Digital Way”.
Google and BT have already started working together on adopting Google technology, with plans in place to complete the core migration of data by 2023.
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“Our partnership with Google is one of a series of strategic moves that BT Digital is taking to help accelerate BT’s growth and digital transformation,” said Harmeen Mehta, chief digital and innovation officer at BT.
“This is a partnership that is deeper than just at the technology level. It will help Digital as a whole supercharge BT and drive its return to growth.”
Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, commented: “We’re proud to collaborate with one of the world’s leading providers of communications services and play an integral part in its digital transformation journey.
“By deploying our full cloud capabilities, and support from our SRE organisation, our goal in this partnership is to set up BT with the tools it needs for future growth and innovation.”
