Aaron McCormack, CEO of BT Conferencing, said his business unit provides managed services on conferencing servers from Cisco (the MeetingPlace product), Avaya (the Spectel technology), and Microsoft (LCS/OCS and LiveMeeting), as well as being a channel partner for WebEx. It is also a Cisco partner for the TelePresence high-end conferencing offering and has just won its first contract, with German consumer electronics retailer Media Saturn.
As a result of providing the service wrap around these products, he said BT Conferencing trains corporate customers’ staff and notifies them when meetings are about to take place, in the course of which it gains a more detailed view of them than is the case for other carriers and the employees of enterprise customers, or indeed for other parts of BTGS.
Carriers usually think of [individual] customers in terms of the corporate they work for, whereas we have to think of them on a more individual basis because we’re providing individual training and coordinating their unified collaboration requirements, he said. Our database knows their names, extension numbers, email addresses, and their level of expertise with the collaboration service we offer, and now we’re considering extending that into MobileXpress.
This is the remote access service for corporate customers, which involves providing travelling employees with a laptop client with which they can get on the internet and access the corporate intranet over DSL, dial-up, WiFi, and, increasingly, mobile connections, with the cost of the usage being charged to the corporate account on a monthly basis rather than requiring local on-the-spot settlement.
