VON: BT brings 21st Century to U.S.

SAN JOSE: The British are coming again, and this time they are planning to help cable companies better compete for larger business companies and aid smaller service providers make the leap to an all-IP world.

BT announced its intentions last year to leverage its experience with its 21^st Century Network – an aggressive push to an all IP network – by selling consulting services to other service providers tackling the same challenge.

In the U.S., BT is now actively courting both Tier 2 and Tier 3 incumbent service providers as well as cable companies, wireless providers, ISPs and CLECs through its revamped Global Telecom Markets organization. And while BT Global Services still sells traditional services – lines and minutes of use – on a wholesale basis to service providers, it is this new services work that BT sees as its growth opportunity, said Michael DeVito, vice president of BT Global Telecom Markets.

“Our job is to monetize all the learnings of 21C,” DeVito said. “It is one of the most radical, ambitious business transformations ever. We’ve spent $18 billion and by 2011, it will be in 170 countries. We’ve been on this journey now for three years, and we’ve learned a lot. We skinned our knees a few times and we figured out some things that we can share.”

Globally, there is a strong response from developing nations looking to leapfrog some currently used TDM technologies and go right to IP, he said. In the U.S., Tier 2 and Tier 3 incumbents are responding strongly to using BT’s expertise as they collapse their multiple networks onto one, DeVito said.

“They have to figure out how to do this technologically without disintermediating their current customers,” he said. “The U.K. is the most competitive market in the world, and we have an interested regulator, so we know about those challenges. In addition, they have to prove in the business case, do an economic analyses and convince their boar [of directors] to make the investment. And then there are organizational questions. BT has 100,000-plus employees in a very regulated labor market, so we know how to address that as well.”

Tier 2 and Tier 3 companies move more quickly than larger players, which is a plus for BT, although they represent less revenue as well, DeVito conceded. Where he sees major opportunity for BT is in the cable world.

“The good news for us is that the cable folks are serious about going after business customers,” he said. “We have a common friend there – we don’t compete with cable for SME [small to mid-sized enterprises] or SMBs [small to mid-sized businesses] like AT&T and Verizon do. We can help them go after the SME and the mid-sized enterprises and as they go up market, we can help them there as well. We know a lot about how to acquire small and medium customers. Where today, they might be only selling High-Speed Internet access, we can help them provide a suite of services beyond that.”

BT has customers in the U.S. and is active discussions with other potential customers, but has not yet publicly announced any signings. DeVito believes that will change within the next six months.

The company is also offering its BT Managed Content Service platform, developed by iO global, a partner company created at BT Labs’ incubator, that enables service providers to customize content delivery based on pre-defined end-user preferences, DeVito said. Both wireless and cable companies are interested in ways to better target both content and advertising, he said, and the platform is designed to enable that.