BT is building out ‘self-healing’ capabilities to its tech estate

UK telco group BT has drafted in Dynatrace to upgrade its service management stack with AI and automation fault detection tools, ahead of a larger deployment of ‘self-healing capabilities’.

BT will consolidate its application monitoring on the Dynatrace Software Intelligence Platform with the aim of with simplifying and adding intelligence to service operations, which it ultimately intends to automate in a new AIOps model.

The idea is that BT will be able to benefit from the consolidated data across its cloud platforms, providing improved fault detection, and ‘end-to-end visibility across the service path’. It’s also pitched as being able to provide early prediction and ‘remediation’ through the previously announced ServiceNow upgrades, which is ‘an estate that heals itself in real time.’

In initial rollouts the system was apparently able to identify issues in real time, instead of 30 minutes after the fact which was the norm. This seems to be all in preparation for ‘self-healing capabilities’ which BT says is running ahead of schedule. It’s also expected that this will save some cash as well, to the tune of £28m by 2027.

“Dynatrace, coupled with ServiceNow, gives us precise insight into our technology estate and consolidates all data in a single pane of glass,” comments Jim Dempsey, Director of Service at BT. “It will let us improve predictability and drive faster resolutions, driving better customer experience.”

Mike Maciag, Chief Marketing Officer at Dynatrace, added: “The Dynatrace platform’s unique approach combines deep observability, runtime application security, and advanced AIOps to provide answers and intelligent automation from data. We are thrilled to work with the BT Group’s digital teams to simplify service operations and build a self-healing system, including automated closed-loop remediation with ServiceNow. The result will free BT’s teams from manual tasks, so they can focus on accelerating digital transformation to deliver consistently better business outcomes.”

BT certainly isn’t shy of stuffing its estate with cutting edge tech. In May it began trialling new hyper-sensitive quantum antennas using ‘excited atomic states’. Atomic radio frequency technology is apparently has around 100 times the sensitivity of traditional receivers, and could boost the capability of next generation 5G and IoT networks, it claims.

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