BT CTO’s departure spotlights IT-centric carrier changes

There may never be a clearer indicator of the change in the carrier market than the departure of BT’s Matt Bross, and the fact that there will no longer be a CTO at BT. The role is being absorbed into the CIO role as the activity merges into a new IT-centric division.

The CIO, Al-Noor Ramji, heads the new Innovate and Design unit that seems to be an integration of web, platform, network and OSS issues and is really more an operations group with IT responsibility. We think it is very clear that BT realizes that software, partnerships, platforms and OSS/BSS are now more central to its operations and profitability than its network.

BT’s 21st Century Network (21CN) has been in transition for two years, and we think the notion will gradually be phased out.