Today I sat in a hotel room in Dubai, overloooking the skyline of the city and resigned from a job that I’ve enjoyed for the last 13 years of my life – working as a Principal Architect for BT Global Services.
In the time that I’ve worked at BT I’ve had the opportunity the work on some truley incredible projects, some of which I can talk about – and some of which I can’t.
BT InterNet a Million
One of the earliest projects I got the opportunity to work on was the launch of BT Internet – along with an online giveaway of a £1,000,000. I was jointly responsible for the architecture of the platform, how we secured the answers (data) and operations. Only a small team within BT was even told about the project as with any IT Security worries, an ‘inside job’ was always the biggest worry. Having designed the front end fabric (if I recall a trusty pair of CISCO 6509’s sitting in front of a raft of HP Servers) – we tried to work out the best way to keep the data and answers secure, and decided that taking the data offline was the answer via ‘sneaker net’. Every night the answers were moved via tape to an offline server which functioned as the ‘prize server’ knowing that no-one could tamper with the data.
The launch went off without a hitch and at the time it was the largest sum of money ever given away online.
Digitisation of the National Health Service (The NHS)
The headline read ‘BT 3 – IBM 0’ as at the end of a long tender process that saw me based from Leeds for month, BT won a huge slice of the NHS Digital Platform. I can remember vividly doing the design work for it, balancing uptime and availability with the impact on patients and clinicians.
I can remember the volumes of data were precedented, we ended up measuring the EMC Storage Arrays in ‘tonnes’, not usually a metric set aside for measuring storage. I can also remember conversations with friends and family who were nervous at this new online/Digital NHS that was being proposed, concerned about the safety of their data. Still to this day I struggle to understand how they thought their data was more secure in a filing cabinet at the back of their local doctors surgery that little Annie had access to from down the road whilst on a work placement !
For what it’s worth – it’s still a Case Study for BT – https://business.bt.com/why-choose-bt/case-studies/nhs-spine
YouView Digital TV Platform
YouView was a consortium of companies seeking to create a new Free-to-Air digital TV experience and crucially provide a quantum leap forward in the user experience of an increasingly fragmented ecosystem of ‘catch up’ TV. BT was working alongside Accenture to produce the ‘Canvas’ system which was the platform which would be responsible for serving up the content to the Set-top boxes.
The whole project was against the clock and highly visible – Lord Sugar of ‘BBC Apprentice’ fame was brought in to help steer what was a complex delivery thanks to his expertise in Amstrad of manufacturing Set Top Boxes (STB’s) for Sky … it was an amazing project to be a part of.
I could go on and list the other amazing projects that I got to work on at BT. Security conversations inside No.10 Downing Street (affectionally known internally as ‘The Street’, the London 2012 Olympic Games platform – at the time the biggest online event in history, just a couple of years ago, the Swine Flu Pandemic working as part of Critical National Infrastructure and building a platform to distribute the Tamiflu retroviral drug to the whole country.
So you might ask why I’m leaving, and where I’m going. What made BT were the people, I got to work with some really incredible people within BT who have helped shape me. Sadly though career progression was something that stalled – as was the aiblity to bring impact. Sometimes it felt it BT that you had to be in the right place, or right department to have a good idea – and if you weren’t, those ideas were either ignored, or replayed as if someone else’s.
My next journey in life takes me to VMware, the company that invented ‘Virtualisation’ and one which because. a key partner and supplier to me at BT. I’ve no idea if I’ll end up there for 10+ years like I did at BT, but I’m looking forward to the new challenge and a new culture – even if I’ll miss the people I’ll be leaving behind.