BT Group is doubling down on its cloud-led digital transformation efforts with Amazon Web Services (AWS) by signing another five-year strategic agreement with the public cloud giant.

The agreement is in support of BT Group’s Build, Connect and Accelerate strategy, which is geared towards positioning the company as the UK’s “most trusted connector”.

As detailed in BT Group’s strategy document, the company aims to achieve this goal by building the most “trusted digital networks” that connect customers so “they thrive as we grow, in a more digital world” while accelerating BT’s modernisation efforts.

The company is already in the midst of a multi-year cloud migration effort with AWS, and this latest agreement is designed to progress this work on from workload migrations to embarking on cloud-native upgrades of the BT infrastructure.

“Building on its ongoing cloud transition with Amazon Web Services (AWS), BT Group is expanding this relationship with a new five-year strategic agreement that will deliver more agile, responsive, and customer-focused digital experiences,” BT said in a statement. “Working with AWS Professional Services, BT will shift its legacy systems into modern, customer-centric microservices.”

The approach BT Group is taking to transitioning its systems over to microservices is aligned with the TM Forum’s Open Digital Architecture (ODA), which provide telcos with a standardised blueprint to guide them through system modernisation projects.

According to the BT Group, following the ODA approach will enable faster innovation and more personalised and reliable customer experiences in the future, as well as a more resilient and secure network for its user base.

“This isn’t just a technology upgrade – it’s a customer promise,” said Tom Meakin, chief strategy and change officer at BT Group. “By modernising our systems with AWS, we’re creating the agility to respond to customer needs faster, deliver more reliable services and introduce features that make everyday interactions with BT simpler and more secure.”

The technology tie-up will also see AWS technologies incorporated into BT Group’s core operations mobile network and its radio access network as part of a push to eventually create a distributed artificial intelligence- based (AI) data platform that supports autonomous network operations.

“BT is also automating several operations processes in its network operations centre [NOC] powered by AWS’s machine learning and generative AI technologies,” said BT in a statement. “This is a critical step in BT’s journey toward a self-healing network – one that can anticipate, detect and resolve issues in real time, dramatically improving resilience and customer experience.”

This part of its infrastructure setup is part of BT’s ambition to bolster the resilience of its networks, said Meakin: “Our ambition is to build a network that thinks ahead – one that can fix itself before customers even notice a problem. We’re in the early stages of this process, but through our work with partners like AWS, we’re one step closer to making it a reality.”

Jan Hofmeyr, vice-president of telecommunications at AWS, said the agreement between the two companies highlights how BT Group is putting customers at the centre of its cloud transformation efforts, adding: “By working with AWS, BT is innovating faster, resolving issues more quickly, and delivering smarter, more secure services that better serve today’s digital-first consumers.”

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