JP Rangaswami

JP Rangaswami is the Chief Scientist for BT and head of BT Voice, reporting to Al-Noor Ramji, the CEO of BT Innovate & Design which is BT Group’s IT design and delivery business. BT Innovate & Design has total responsibility for designing, building and implementing BT’s IT and business processes, systems, networks (non-Openreach) and technologies. JP has been responsible for influencing BT from within to transform it from a telco to a ‘softco’, by exploiting new business models, highlighting the opportunities of Web2.0 and social media and advising on new technology. He is an advocate for community-based open source development methods and practices.

He also leads BT’s overall voice platform which is looking to exploit different business models to deliver new revenue streams for the company. In this role, he is chairman of Ribbit which is described as Silicon Valley’s first telephone company. Ribbit is breaking the mould of communications by developing a very open voice platform which allows the integration of voice services into applications.

He has extensive international experience and is passionate about delivering outstanding end-to-end customer experience. He is known for his visionary views and inspiring leadership and is a regular speaker at industry events, particularly on innovation, open source and the usage of social media in the enterprise.

JP joined BT from Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein where he served as Global CIO demonstrating recognised market leadership in the use of innovative tools and techniques.

He is a fervent and well-recognised blogger (www.confusedofcalcutta.com), tweeter (www.twitter.com/jobsworth) and was voted into the top 10 of a "Top 20 Rock Stars Of Web 2.0" from ditto.net in 2009. He was number 11 on silicon.com’s agenda setters list in 2008 and number 15 in the list of the top 50 IT leaders judged to be changing the business world by online business technology journal InformationWeek. He wrote a chapter for the 10th anniversary edition of The Cluetrain Manifesto, published in July 2009, the seminal book on the impact of the internet on businesses.

He is a Fellow of the British Computer Society (BCS) and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (RSA).

Passionate about education, he is chairman of the School of Everything (www.schoolofeverything.com), a startup focused on social action through education. He also serves on the management board of Kings Church International (www.kcionline.org) and on the board of trustees of Byte Night, (www.bytenight.org.uk), the IT industry's annual sleep out in aid of the national children's charity Action for Children.