BT shake-up puts Green in pole position as successor to Verwaayen

BT has reorganised its management and structure in a move that sparked speculation over who may succeed Ben Verwaayen at the top.

The company is to create two new divisions, moving some 20,000 staff into BT Design and BT Operate, which will be headed by Andy Green, now chief executive of BT Global Services. He will take on the title CEO group strategy and operations.

The divisions will incorporate all the company's network design and operation expertise, and led to speculation that Mr Green is being placed to succeed Mr Verwaayen as chief executive.

Mr Green's role will be taken on by Francois Barrault, formerly president of BT International, who will join the BT board. He had been responsible for building the company's business abroad.

Under the reorganisation, Global Services, along with BT Retail and BT Wholesale, will keep their marketing, sales and customer services operations but receive strategic input from the new R&D divisions led by Mr Green.

The company said the shake-up was intended to "deliver faster, more resilient and cost effective services to customers" and would "accelerate BT's transformation into a networked IT services company".

BT Design will have the job of developing new services and BT Operate will have to put them into operation. The company said the shake-up would help its existing business units to launch services faster and more efficiently.

Mr Verwaayen said: "This is the second phase of BT's transformation. The first phase saw BT shift its focus from narrowband to broadband (internet). This next stage is equally important. It will see BT advance from a 20th-century hardware company to a 21st-century software-based services company."

The Dresdner Kleinwort analyst Lawrence Sugarman played down talk of Mr Verwaayen stepping down early. He said: "We often hear speculation about management change and investors worry that Verwaayen may leave near term, but as the focus on a move to software-based services is his, we judge that he intends to stay around for some time yet."

However, the summer retirement of Sir Christopher Bland, the chairman who has been closely involved with Mr Verwaayen's turnaround efforts, led some to speculate that he could hand the next phase of BT's development to someone else, perhaps Mr Green.

The Openreach telephone line and broadband unbundling division will be unchanged by the restructuring.

BT shares finished the day down 1.5p at 312.5p.