BT AGAIN A LEADER IN GARTNER’S 2015 MAGIC QUADRANT FOR NETWORK SERVICES, GLOBAL

BT today announced that it has been positioned by Gartner, Inc. in the Leaders Quadrant in the Magic Quadrant for Network Services, Global (NSP) for the eleventh time. Network Service Providers are evaluated by Gartner across seven criteria for their ability to execute and across eight criteria for their completeness of vision.

BT also received the highest product scores in 5 out of 5 use cases in Gartner’s Critical Capabilities for Network Services, Pan-European report for the second consecutive year. In that report, BT receives the highest score in the Product Score for Overall use case (4.73 out of 5) and in each of the four product use cases for Midsize European Network (4.78 out of 5), Large European Network (4.77 out of 5), Multicountry Branch Network (4.80 out of 5) and Core City Backbone (4.65 out of 5). The report evaluates 11 vendors, including BT Global Services, against seven critical product capabilities: managed MPLS VPNs, Ethernet Services, managed Internet VPNs & hybrid WANs, Internet Access, SIP trunks, managed WAN optimisation and application performance management, managed LAN and WLAN.

These placements come three months after BT was positioned by Gartner, Inc, in the Leaders Quadrant for the Communications Outsourcing and Professional Services Magic Quadrant for the fifth year running[1].

At the global level, according to Gartner, “the number of organizations requiring global networking services continues to grow, due to globalization and the growing adoption of cloud services, which are often hosted in markets that differ from the point of consumption. Organizations' appetite for more bandwidth shows no signs of diminishing. IT centralization, cloud adoption and the continued growth of applications such as video, machine-to-machine communications and big data are the primary drivers. Reliability and performance control are growing in importance, as business processes become ever-more IT dependent.” Gartner states that in this context “Vendors in the Leaders quadrant are performing well today and maintain a stable organization with a clear vision of market direction. They deliver comprehensive portfolios of network services, across broad geographies, with good service quality. They address the global networking needs of a broad range of enterprises in terms of size, geographic distribution and vertical industry. Leaders shape the direction of the market by extending their coverage, developing new class-leading capabilities and new commercial models, and deploying these at scale.“

Considering Europe, Gartner states that “The Pan-European network service market is evolving to support enterprise use of cloud IT services, and has a growing emphasis on hybrid networks and SIP trunks.” Gartner also states that “Enterprise IT and networking leaders should specify their Pan-European WAN service needs based on their required outcomes, such as application availability and performance, not technologies, as well as evaluate each provider's ability to deliver service levels that meet these objectives for each location.”

Luis Alvarez, chief executive officer of BT Global Services, said: “These latest reports will be of interest to our customers. They will appreciate the great insight into the most current trends in our industry and find food for thought as they set out to use technology in new and creative ways to improve their business outcomes. In order to continue improving our positions, we announced in October new capabilities including expanded reach, enhanced performance in the cloud and new services to address the opportunities of the future.  We have also been investing in portal enhancements designed to improve the customer experience and speed of delivery. We are now moving further, with service trials of Virtual customer premise equipment (CPE), Network Function Virtualisation (NFV) and Software Defined Networking (SDN) recently deployed with customers, with the aim to introduce them as standard solutions within the next twelve months.“

To view the full global report, click here

Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Global Network Service Providers, Neil Rickard, Bjarne Munch, January 2015.

To view the full pan-European report, click here

Gartner, Critical Capabilities for Network Service, Pan-European s, Neil Rickard, Katja Ruud, January 2015