BT: Ribbit deal start of 'global telecom platform wars'

Incumbent telcos, meanwhile, have had a mixed start in allowing more open application development. Verizon Wireless touted its open network approach earlier this year, but has been relatively quiet since then. Vendor BroadSoft – which counts many Tier 1 carriers among its VoIP platform customers – has been aggressively pushing its SDK platform, though its still in its early days.

BT first came out to Ribbit’s Silicon Valley headquarters about seven months ago, and the startup was surprised at how well the two companies fit together, said Ribbit CEO Ted Griggs in the same interview. “We were obviously curious as to how [the meeting] would go. But by the end of the conversation we realized that they’d focused on interfaces that fed into the network, SOAP interfaces, etc., while we’d built client-side interfaces. We could each go and build what the other side had or we could bring together these two likeminded companies and declare victory, essentially.”

While a declaration of “victory” is undoubtedly premature, the two companies do make an interesting pairing. BT promises to let Ribbit run independently while over time bringing together the two company’s APIs and deliver services via BT’s global network.

Perhaps the biggest challenge in bringing Ribbit into the fold – and one that other telcos will face when looking at similar deals – was to structure the acquisition of a classic, Silicon Valley “pre-revenue” startup. To that end, Rangaswami said, BT isn’t putting specific revenue goals on Ribbit, rather focusing their effort on leveraging its technology and growing its now-combined developer communities.