Mark Amoss recently joined the BT Global Telecom Markets (GTM) team as general manager, international voice business.  Global Telecom News introduces him to you in this interview.

How did you come to GTM, Mark?

I spent the past three years managing the international direct dial (IDD) product portfolio across the BT Group.  One of the responsibilities of my team of pricing, product management and system specialists was to help sales account managers get voice offers out to our customers.  I liked working behind the scenes but wanted to be out in front with our customers.  GTM gives me the opportunity to do that.

What excites you about working in GTM?

Even though BT is probably the seventh or eighth largest international carrier and one of the largest wholesalers globally, research indicates that we have yet only addressed a smaller part of the global IDD voice market.  That means we have a huge opportunity to grow our business by helping our customers.

How do you plan to do that?

We will show customers that they can trust BT to carry their voice traffic. For example, I’d like them to know about our world-class International Network Management Centre at Oswestry. The INMC brings together international voice, signalling, transmission and commercial teams into one central location.  It manages traffic for all of the company’s European nodes and provides pre-emptive and proactive solutions and outstanding 24×7 customer service.

We want to further develop our ability to meet our customers’ requirements, to deliver what they need in terms of quality, reliability and value for money. To do that, we have to get to know our individual customers better and understand their requirements better.  Then we have to leverage the products we have and roll out new ones to meet those requirements. So we envisage a customer-connected approach and not an anonymous rate table business. Clearly, taking this approach clearly will help us enable our customers to succeed.

We also want our BT Global IP Exchange to lead in the roll-out of IP Interoperability.  The Global IPX is already changing the way we sell voice.  Rather than buying minutes, many of them are starting to buy an IP-based connection to our platform and use it as a starting point for migrating traffic to IP, adding new services and addressing new market segments without the need to change the platform in the future. This will save them a lot of money.

BT Wholesale focuses on the market in the United Kingdom but GTM looks at the world.  Do you plan to travel to meet customers in your new role?

Yes, in fact when I started the new job on the first of July, I had already met GTM customers at International Telecom Week (ITW) in the US .  In the first month I visited many customers and BT people in seven countries on three continents, and I plan to visit others soon.

Is there anything you would like to say in closing?

Yes: I’m excited about my new role and I look forward to meeting as many GTM customers as I can to understand  their requirements and hopefully help them address those requirements with our portfolio.  I plan to attend Carriers World in September and the Global Carrier Community Meeting in October.  I hope some of the people reading this will come to see me there.

If they would like to make an appointment, or to talk before then, they can contact me now.

Biography

As general manager, international voice business, Mark is responsible for managing the distribution channel for International direct dial (IDD) service for BT Global Telecom Markets (GTM).  He brings 20+ years of experience in the telecoms industry to his role.  A recent addition to the GTM team, he came from BT Wholesale, where he led commercial management. Before joining BT, his experience included finance- and interconnect-related management positions in City of London Telecom (COLT) and Cable & Wireless.

This is Mark’s second tenure in BT.  He first worked for the company in 1990 at BT’s innovations centre at Adastral Park.

In his spare time Mark enjoys gardening and country pursuits.  His idea of a great vacation is big-game fishing for days at a time.