BT Drives Upgrade Strategy, Ensures Ongoing Supportability, and Guarantees Mission-Critical Operations with Exceptional Support
 
 

BT Drives Upgrade Strategy, Ensures Ongoing Supportability, and Guarantees Mission-Critical Operations with Exceptional Support

  • Oracle Customer:  BT
    Location:  London, United Kingdom
    Industry:  Communications
    Employees:  92,600
    Annual Revenue:  Over $5 Billion

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BT is one of the world’s leading providers of communications solutions and services, with operations in 170 countries. Its main activities include providing TV products and services as well as services for fixed-line, broadband, mobile, and networked IT.

BT has provided communications services for more than 100 years. In recent decades, its IT infrastructure estate grew significantly to reach current global volumes of 17,000 databases and 30,000 servers. Managing an estate of this size and complexity presented a significant challenge, and BT needed to streamline, consolidate, and simplify operations to improve efficiency across all lines of business.

Today, BT works with Oracle Advanced Customer Support Services to assist with on-going upgrade programs to bring BT infrastructure up-to-date and to ensure all systems are fully supportable. In addition, Oracle Advanced Customer Support Services’ invaluable services help to solve problems that may arise and prevent unplanned downtime from affecting customer service.

Oracle plays a vital role in assisting BT Retail with the management of Oracle’s Siebel Contact Center application, which houses 13 million customer records and is critical to the everyday operation of the BT Retail business. ACS has also been pivotal in assisting BT with its program to consolidate and upgrade its finance systems on a global scale.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from BT

  • "Oracle Advanced Customer Support Services provides an invaluable service, both on a proactive and a reactive basis. ACS helps to ensure our business-critical systems are always on, and it is also instrumental in helping with our complex upgrade program across the organization." – Arnie Hensby, Oracle First Program Manager, BT

  • Mitigate risk of down time by collaborating with a team of Oracle experts to avoid outage situations and ensure that systems critical to BT customer service—such as Oracle’s Siebel Contact Center, which houses 13 million BT Retail customer records—are always available
  • Ensure that staff with a detailed knowledge of BT’s infrastructure and applications are always available to fix any problems that arise on an ad-hoc basis and ensure that BT’s core systems remain fully operational
  • Update BT’s vast and varied infrastructure, simplify its management with a planned series of upgrades and consolidations to streamline and simplify operations, and ensure full support across entire infrastructure
  • Reduce customization across business critical systems to simplify operations and improve supportability
  • Migrate a range of financial systems to one Oracle Financials instance for the UK and one for the rest of the world to streamline and simplify operations, reduce costs, and guarantee on-going supportability
  • Provide a valuable extra layer of hands-on and knowledgeable support to assist with planned change and ensure minimum disruption to BT’s everyday business of providing networked IT, telephone, mobile, television, and broadband services on a global scale

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Worked with a team of 80 from Oracle Advanced Customer Support Services to provide tailored, mission-critical support throughout BT’s businesses
  • Worked with Oracle’s highly trained support professionals who have a detailed knowledge of BT’s complex systems to prevent outages and reduce downtime
  • Collaborated with Oracle to quickly identify problems and prepare solutions to ensure that mission-critical systems, such as Siebel Contact Center, are always operational
  • Avoided downtime costs for Siebel Contact Center, which could reach US$4.7 million per hour during peak trading hours and when customers may wish to purchase broadband, telephone, or television services
  • Provided business critical problem resolution to prevent any IT problem from becoming a major disaster and prevented residual effects on the daily business of providing networked IT, telecommunications, broadband, and TV services to business and retail customers
  • Leveraged Oracle Advanced Customer Support Services’ detailed knowledge and expertise to resolve issues quickly and ensure that critical applications are up and running at all times
  • Reduced by 14% the overall numbers of service requests in 2011 and for category 2 service requests by 20%, demonstrating an improvement in stability across core systems
  • Managed a global program with Oracle Advanced Customer Support Services to bring numerous accounting systems, including some spreadsheets and nonstandard financial systems across to Oracle Financials, while preparing the foundation for an upgrade to Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12
  • Aligned functionality within the financial systems across the organization to prevent their reaching end-of-life and to deliver one supportable, upgradable instance of Oracle Financials for the UK and one for the rest of the world
  • Reduced customizations across Oracle Financials to ensure greater supportability and a more straightforward path to the planned upgrade to Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12

Why Oracle

“I would definitely recommend Oracle Advanced Customer Support Services. At BT, we need a higher level of support for a very complex IT environment, and the service we receive from Oracle is second to none,”said Arnie Hensby, Oracle first program manager, BT

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