UK telecoms group BT has folded its Division X business, founded early 2022, further into its BT Business division. The consolidation, which makes Division X a part of its product team within BT Business, has seen Marc Overton, managing director at Division X, call it a day. BT implied the move will mean more commercially-minded innovation, and a clearer route to market for its private 5G, edge compute, and enterprise IoT solutions.
The story was broken by UK trade title Telecom TV, and was not trailed by its press team – in the manner of the more strategically-significant reorganisation of its national (BT Enterprise) and international (BT Global) enteprise divisions into a single BT Business division late last year. Responding to the original version of this article on RCR Wireless, published yesterday (May 10), BT clarified Division X was made a part of BT Business with the BT Business rejig, and has not therefore been “folded-in”.
“It’s business as usual for customers and partners,” it responded. Overton (who turned out as a senior reservist at the UK coronation on May 6; also as Regimental Lieutenant Colonel 1st Battalion London Guards) exits BT at the end of June. The product team within BT Business is headed by Kerry Small; Alex Foster has been appointed to lead Division X on an interim basis, clarified BT. Bas Burger is in charge at BT Business; he assumed the role with the merger of the company’s two enterprise divisions at the end of 2022. Rob Shuter, formerly chief executive at BT Enterprise, exited with the consolidation.
BT said in a statement: “As part of creating our new BT Business unit, we have doubled down on innovation by bringing Division X into the heart of our product team. This will enable us to build on its strong positioning in the market – and continue to help business and public sector customers unlock the benefits of technologies like private 5G, IoT, edge computing and others.”
Whether in name, as well, BT said: “Division X remains; our plans for it and commitment to innovation haven’t changed.” It added: “This will embed innovation more deeply into our products and services and bring its benefits closer to customers.”
Division X was established on the back of a ‘charter’ to invest almost £100 million in the period to 2025, as part of broader strategy to establish itself as a ‘tech-co’ (“not a telco”), offering 5G, AI, and IoT tech to spur Industry 4.0. The new charter set out a strategy to provide private enterprise and public sector customers – BT claims 1.2 million of them in the UK – with an edge-to-cloud “springboard” for digital change. The launch coincided with BT’s move to delineate EE as the consumer brand and BT as the business brand.
