BT has selected Google Cloud for a five-year partnership that will support the telecom giant’s plan for company-wide digital transformation and the creation of new services.

The project, led by BT’s Digital unit, will introduce a range of Google Cloud products and services: from cloud infrastructure and data analytics, to artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), as well as security and API management.

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BT said it hopes to use these tools to deliver improved customer experience, as well as reduce costs and risk, and build new revenue streams.

BT launched its Digital unit in January 2021 with the aim of developing and delivering products and platforms for the healthcare and data sectors, with solutions such as cloud-based unified communications (UC) and collaboration services. However, its digital transformation work can be traced back to 2016, when BT revealed its Digital Possible initiative that offered CIOs assistance in adopting digital transformation in their organisations.

However, the unit has also been tasked with internal overhauls, including transforming the state of BT’s overall IT and digital innovation, and will lead the changes set out under the Google Cloud partnership. This includes creating a group-wide data strategy built on artificial intelligence (AI), and a new strategy to overhaul product development based on continuous innovation and automation.

Commenting on the announcement, BT chief digital and innovation officer Harmeen Mehta described the Google Cloud partnership as “one of a series of strategic moves that BT Digital is taking to help accelerate BT’s growth and digital transformation”.

“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,” he added.

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said that the tech giant is “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,” he added.

Google Cloud and BT have already begun working together on adopting Google’s technology, with the migration of core data scheduled to be finalised by 2023.

 The news comes eight months after BT and Google announced a security partnership that saw the UK operator roll out new Google Cloud products to the managed security services market.

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