Waters Rankings 2017: Best Network Provider—BT

“It’s an endorsement of our strategy, most particularly an endorsement from clients, not just on what we’re doing but how we’re doing it,” Woodman says. “It also gives us a good indicator of what we actually should do more of in order to move forward and keep ahead of the curve.”

BT has expanded its reach to customers over the past few years by deploying its full fabric network to additional datacenters. Before 2016, BT had the full network in around 10 centers and has since doubled that number to more than 20.

“Before 2016, our infrastructure was very simple and was really about getting customers in and out of datacenters to others in our ecosystem,” Woodman says. “Making the datacenters the core of our infrastructure, and increasing the scope of what we can offer customers within and around these datacenters, allows clients to drive simplicity and cost reduction.”

Radianz Cloud provides an application environment for financial services firms to interact with clients at a faster pace than might otherwise be possible. Woodman notes that speed-to-market and network reliability are the most important concerns of many of its capital markets customers, and the company has worked to meet those demands—the expanded reach in datacenters provides the network capability to distribute applications quickly, particularly for financial technology firms that want to reach a wider audience.

“With the number of fintech companies using public clouds, we’ve seen that when they actually come to a more managed environment, a lot of our customers have seen an increase in trade activity as a result of the reliability we can give them,” Woodman says. “What’s coming clear to us is latency is becoming less of a differentiator because everyone’s had to improve their overall game in that space. Our customers are starting to say that while they expect really good (minimal) latency, they are increasingly focused on reliability and market-relevant reach.”