BT turns to utility computing

BT, fresh off changes in senior management and a corporate structure designed to streamline the carrier for the Web services era, is making a foray into browser-based utility computing, a software-as-a-service trend that could change how enterprise IT departments use data centers and how service providers operate them.

Utility computing, otherwise known as grid computing, “takes a lot of computing power and hardware and turns it into a shared resource pool that service providers can use to build new services,” said Nick Blozan, senior vice president of worldwide sales for 3Tera, the company whose operating system, AppLogic, BT is using as the foundation for its service. “This way, you can use computing as you would any other utility. It's moldable by their customers through an interface they already have: a browser.”

Utility computing could result in less need to access the resources of brick-and-mortar co-location centers and less reason for service providers to build and maintain those types of facilities. “If you look at the difference between what a data center was fifteen years ago and what it is now, you will see as big a difference fifteen years from now,” Blozan said. “You may see huge data centers with very few people in them.”

Large businesses in several industries have begun utility computing pilot programs, but BT is among the first traditional telecom service providers to invest in the concept. In fact, it is just one of the ways BT recently has begun to shake the “traditional” tag, said Venkat Raju, senior strategy consultant for BT. “Customers are looking for software-as-a-service, and it's not a matter of how but when that becomes mainstream,” he said. “Customers actually have been talking about this trend for years, and the question is, will they take software-as-a-service from a telco? That will be our challenge.”

Raju said BT has been looking into utility computing for a while and that the carrier considered building its own platform and also considered other vendors before settling on 3Tera. “We had a couple of trials — about six months worth of trials of different things,” Raju said.

Blozan added that the two companies have worked together for almost a year, and that it was BT that first approached 3Tera. The vendor just announced version 2.0 of its AppLogic grid operating system last month.

BT's move into utility computing seems to fit with other recent moves the carrier has made in the interest of re-strategizing and restructuring with a Web services model in mind. The carrier's 21st Century Network (21CN) project, which will convert all BT's legacy telecom infrastructure to an IP-based network by 2011, is ongoing, and customer self-service flexibility is implicit in the mission of the project. Also, just last month BT split itself into two separate units — BT Design and BT Operate — with the aim of streamlining how the organization responds to the service needs of individual customers.

“We have the 21CN, and then we have this effort to create the equivalent IT infrastructure,” Raju said. “We're moving to a model that really is similar to what Google or Amazon are doing now.” Raju said he believes other traditional telecom carriers have similar goals in mind but haven't gotten as far as BT has with them. “We see some carriers with good competitive offerings, but they don't have the strategy in place,” he said. “Actions like this speak louder than press releases do.”