• BT announces a  Personalised Compute Management System (PCMS)
• New service will help companies digitally transform, collaborate and grow
• Customers can offer it to their own customers or value added resellers

“Platform” seems to be a buzzword gaining ever more currency in our telecoms neck of the woods. It’s one of those ‘difficult to define in a sentence, but you know it when you hear about it’ concepts.

Is it like a packaged holiday as opposed to series of journeys and some separately arranged accommodation?

Perhaps.  

How about a ‘thing’ which enables you to build your own ‘thing’ on top?

That too.

In BT’s case - and in this story - it’s a “Business Platform-as-a-Service”, and is being flagged as the first of its kind widely available in the market. The platform, called BT Personalised Compute Management System (PCMS), has a mission to help companies speed  time-to-market for new digital services (and to disrupt their traditional business models and create new ways to grow). BT says PCMS is built on its existing cloud management platform which  allows its users to self-serve, purchase and access cloud services online.

So it’s a cloud management offering (sorry, platform)?

Yes, but there has to be more to it than that. BT says customers will be able to use it to consume or bring their own digital services to market, helping them to simplify and accelerate their digital transformation.

So it’s a sort of digital business starter kit?

Well, yes. Users “will gain access to ready-made business support processes and functions to enable them to sell, fulfil and monetise their own portfolio of digital services. Customers wanting rapid entry into the cloud market will be able to resell BT’s existing digital ecosystem services such as Cloud Compute, Compute Storage and Apps from BT available from a choice of 22 locations around the world. This can be for internal consumption or for sale to their own customers, value added resellers or to cross-sell to other PCMS users.”

So it’s really a wholesale or channel offering?  

It can be. In that regard it offers more than 45 digitalised business support processes, such as product management, customer management, user authentication, order management, service management and billing and collections.

As a platform with a global catalogue of business support services, says BT, it can simplify how customers manage their digital services globally. PCMS supports multiple sales and execution channels, each with the appropriate local language, currency, pricing and contract terms.

“By building on a proven platform, businesses can confidently bring their digital services to market within shorter timescales and concentrate time and resources on innovation and development. It’s a great example of how BT’s Cloud of Clouds portfolio strategy empowers customers to create new business relationships.” says Neil Lock, vice president Compute, Global Services, BT.

The platform will be made globally available in the fourth quarter of 2017.