The iBridge middleware is designed to connect phone exchanges to LCS, with the first two vendors whose PBXs are supported being Cisco and Nortel, the former an IP PBX, the latter a conventional circuit-switched one. Mike MacDonald, business development director for BT Convergent Solutions, said the London-based carrier expects to have connectors available for exchanges from Avaya and Siemens by the end of this quarter.
This will allow companies to offer LCS functionality such as click-to-call within Outlook and transitioning between different ways of communicating, from IM to voice or video, he went on. The system also has presence and incoming call alerts, and will allow employees working from home to divert calls to their work number to their fixed residential or mobile numbers without callers needing to know them. MacDonald said the fact that non-IP PBXs are also supported by iBridge is due to the fact that they have a CTI interface on them that can link to the iBridge for control of the TDM lines.
The iBridge plus LCS offering is charged for on a per-user basis, such that for a 1,000-user deployment, a company would be paying 30 pounds ($55) a year on a three-year contract, including support and maintenance, said MacDonald. The UK incumbent is launching the service initially in its home country, but plans to extend it firstly to other countries in Europe, then eventually go global with it, he went on.
The iBridge offering comprises a piece of hardware, namely the iBridge appliance, deployed and managed by BT, which also throws in some diagnostics on usage trends etc. As to the target market for the iBridge and LCS offering, MacDonald said it was organizations with disperse workforces that want to integrate existing their telephony platforms with their desktops. It’s what Forrester Research calls Unified Synchronized Communications, which it expects a third of the Global 2000 to have implemented by 2008.
BT also announced that it has integrated MeetMe, which until now has been exclusively an audio conferencing service, with Microsoft Office Live Meeting 2005, enabling BT to offer a web conferencing experience.
You’ll be able to set up a conference from the Outlook calendar, with participants requiring a single click to join and management of the event being carried out from a single console for both audio and video, said Alison Lawrence, head of portfolio for BT Conferencing.
BT is upgrading all its existing MeetMe users to Live Meeting and, after rolling it out in the UK, plans to expand the offering into the US later this year, Lawrence went on. BT also announced that it had been named a global reseller of the Live Meeting software by Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft.
This is the latest in a number of joint initiatives by BT and Microsoft, which unveiled a broad alliance in September 2002 after the telco had dabbled with ASP offerings of the ISV’s software and other endeavours. The alliance covers five areas, namely digital consumer; MSN and broadband; mobile computing; Web services (i.e. .Net) and, finally, business productivity, which is where this latest set of announcements fit.
LCS, of which Live Meeting is one part, is clearly central to Microsoft’s growth strategy for the coming years, enabling it to leverage its commanding 97%-plus share of the office productivity market and, by adding significant extra functionality, derive additional revenue. It should also make it easier to convince corporate users of the need to upgrade to the latest version of the Office suite.
For BT, the relationship with Microsoft is clearly of key importance as it moves more into the IT service business, de-emphasizing it is role as the provider of a bitpipe into the corporate customer’s premises.
The success of the iBridge offering clearly depends on companies wanting to continue getting their communications, be they voice, data or video, as a service. One wonders, however, whether as the sheer number of conferences they are holding to replace physical meetings and cut down on travelling increases, the bigger corporations might not look at a DIY alternative.
Certainly companies like enterprise telephony vendor Avaya, from the circuit-switched world but also a keen advocate of VoIP, are already developing conferencing software, to be delivered as an appliance, for big customers to run their own conferences and cut down on service costs.
In essence, it will come down to a capex vs. opex argument. Simon Boyle, channel development manager for IT and networking service company Dimension Data in the UK, commented that the public sector in particular tends to like costs that are on a per-month or per-annum basis, as they have no capital assets and pay for everything out of their operating budgets. Enterprises, on the other hand, do accumulate assets that can be amortized over time, and may want to lower opex.
