BT’s power play - Ctrl Alt Lead podcast

Slashing energy and costs at the UK’s oldest telco

BT draws 1% of the UK’s power, but Clare Schramm is working to cut that through software, hardware and vendor partnerships.

BT is the UK’s largest fixed-line telco, and the country’s oldest. Providing for everyone from consumers to 999 services, the IT estate is sprawling, varied and old.

The cloud services division is BT’s own “internal hyperscaler,” says department head Clare Schramm. It builds all the infrastructure and services that host BT’s IT, trading and network systems – which is, she points out, “a lot of responsibility.”

In this episode, Clare talks about how BT is formalising its sustainability goals, with metrics now included in all commercial tenders and renewals, and how that has changed the company’s relationship with its various vendor partners.

We also talked about new approaches to software and hardware – “We have a lot of spaghetti interfaces” – and Clare shared her tips for other IT leaders in the same position wanting to extract more output for less power.

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