Company Announcement - BT today announced it is supporting ABB in the transformation and management of its global communications infrastructure across Europe, the Americas, Africa, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific. ABB, a world leader in power and automation, will also benefit from improved application performance and additional IT security delivered by BT. The services are covered by a global contract designed to improve collaboration, innovation and business transformation for ABB in more than 100 countries.

As part of a major transformation project, ABB required a single global partner to provide, standardise and manage network related services around the world. BT was selected to connect more than 700 ABB locations in more than 100 countries with its Internet Connect and IP Connect services, allowing 140,000 ABB employees to work more securely, with a standardised experience for all users. The solution will enable ABB employees to more effectively communicate and collaborate with each other and with customers and partners across the globe. The global network infrastructure designed by BT will connect users to data and applications stored in ABB’s hybrid cloud and will be the foundation for ABB’s future use of cloud services from a variety of suppliers.

“The alignment with BT will enable us to move to a globally consistent, high quality network”, said Andy Tidd, Chief Information Officer at ABB. “This key component of our new IT infrastructure will support ABB’s three focus areas of profitable growth, relentless execution and business-led collaboration.”BT will have end-to-end responsibility for the quality and performance of the network services and will optimise and accelerate the network so that it better supports ABB’s most strategic business applications. BT will also be responsible for the local area networks (LAN) across more than 700 ABB locations and will provide security across network assets and services. This includes the management of 400 firewalls and the provision of BT Assure cyber protection and analytics services to protect ABB’s network and IT systems against threats.

Luis Alvarez, CEO of BT Global Services said, “We are very proud that a global leader such as ABB has chosen BT to orchestrate their network services around the globe. ABB has ambitious growth plans with their Next Level strategy, and we will support them by leveraging our expertise in the energy and manufacturing sector and our experience in protecting the global IT infrastructure of multi-national corporations. We are also looking forward to helping ABB embrace the great new opportunities offered by the cloud, wherever those might be hosted. Together we are determined to creatively use technology to deliver great business outcomes.”