Colin Bannon is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for BT Business based in the company’s head office in London, UK. He delivers BT’s product technology strategy and design, as well as customer solutions that support business outcomes across the unit’s entire UK and international customer base. 

 

Colin leads a CTO team delivering for customers of all sizes from the largest multinational enterprises and governmental organisations to small and medium-sized businesses (SMB). 

 

They support customers choosing from a core portfolio of over 200 communication services delivered across 180 countries in vertical sectors including government, defence and healthcare as well as banking & finance, retail, wholesale telecommunications, mining, logistics and manufacturing.   

 

Colin is the architect of some of the largest customer network transformations in the world, including BT’s new global network-as-a-service (NaaS) platform, Global Fabric. Global Fabric is a fully digitalised, automated, API-first platform that includes Internet, MPLS, Ethernet, Cloud interconnectivity, DC Interconnect, Mobile Interconnect, Data Sovereignty, DDos, and Edge Compute. It supports service insertion including SD-WAN and SASE, SSE, SIP, Load Balancing, and Firewalls. Following the announcement of Global Fabric, BT was recognised by Gartner as being the furthest on “Completeness of Vision” in the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Global WAN Services.

 

One of Colin’s many responsibilities is to anticipate technology trends such as AI development and to ensure BT can support customers’ future roadmaps, keeping the company relevant in a fast-changing digital world. He acts as a trusted advisor for many customers’ chief information officers (CIOs) and facilitates BT’s global customer advisory board. 

 

Colin is an award-winning and recognised industry expert in designing, deploying and running many of the world’s largest next generation networks. His holistic philosophy to network design, works back from business outcomes, user experience and applications dev strategy to inform intuitive network, architecture, systems and service-wrap design. He is a sought-after industry speaker and is active in several technology advisory/standards boards supporting the vendor ecosystem. He also lectures at Warwick University. 

 

In addition to his 20 years at BT, including roles such as Chief Architect, Colin previously held engineering leadership and consulting engineer positions in IBM Global Services, Lucent INS and Unisys.