I heard about two significant initiatives from BT last week, that weren’t given much fanfare, but could turn out to be very important for both the SaaS market in the UK, and BT’s position within it.
I’ve mentioned that one of the key messages at Microsoft ISV Innovation Day, last Thursday at Thames Valley Park, was the rise in importance of the SaaS topic. With the help of IDC, Microsoft were giving strong guidance to their ISVs that they should make plans to adopt this delivery model as a matter of urgency. James Hamilton of BT was there, presenting the case for BT as a partner, as well as explaining some of their plans in the SaaS arena. Obviously BT are the telco in the strongest position in the UK marketplace, both for consumers and business. They have over 50% of the UK business broadband market, and they are the largest provider of hosted Microsoft exchange servers. There is one new initiative that very definitely wasn’t mentioned on the joint platform with Microsoft (see later) but one that was. They are setting up the BT Marketplace, which aims to be an application exchange for SaaS based solutions targeted at SMEs, not unlike Salesforce.com’s AppExchange. There is a key difference to the SFdC option though, as there are no technical or platform implications. In theory, any SaaS solution could be eligible. Initially BT are interested in building up a broad portfolio of good solutions to attract a wide range of SMEs. Eventually, I’m sure they will have designs on partnering with the more successful solutions in some form of branded BT business solution. With Microsoft, they are inviting companies to join. I met a number of organisations at the event who sell a SaaS solution in the Enterprise space which could be perfectly applicable to the SME market, but who are struggling to apply their current cost of sale and methodology to make money with smaller clients. This could be an attractive way of going to market for them. We’re in the process of investigating getting on board, and I’ll report more in the coming weeks. I spoke with Dennis about this yesterday. See his analysis and thoughts on the topic.
The second BT initiative comes courtesy of the Dennis connection. He picked up on the fact that BT Workspace was announced last week. This was very definitely not mentioned by BT at the Microsoft session, as it has significant overlap the Microsoft OfficeLive products. BT Workspace is yet another small business collaboration platform, providing a web based solution that helps groups of people share information, manage projects, and improve customer relationships. It provides Intranet capability to host bulletin boards, discussions, documents and manage sales opportunities, and Extranet capabilities for project collaboration with customers and suppliers. As with comparable solutions elsewhere there is a free option, BT Workplace Lite, and subscription upgrades for more users, additional features and extra storage.
You might say “so what?”. This kind of thing is available from Microsoft, or Google or Zoho, or there are a plethora of SaaS based collaboration tools from Central Desktop, Near-Time, etc. etc., etc. For me there are two significant factors. The first is trust. A typical small business is going to be much more comfortable and secure trusting their private data to a company like BT over Google. The second is BT’s size and marketing muscle. If they get behind this properly with the appropriate positioning, even though the solution may have deficiencies, I think it will succeed. Dennis has had a chance to give the product a run through. You should go and read his comments and analysis. I’ll be making more comments over the coming weeks, once I’ve had time to do a proper test drive.
Of course, at a company the size of BT, these kind of initiatives come and go. For example BT are just in the process of closing down BT Transact. This was a trading network to connect customers and suppliers with EDI style transaction and content management tools. Manoj Ranaweera, who’s company ebdex operates in this same space, tells me that the offering has failed through a combination of old technology, wrong pricing structure and not enough management attention. They had, however, picked up some significant blue chip customers, and this is just the kind of thing you would expect them to make a success of - but they haven’t.
It’s difficult to find significant press or new media coverage of either of these initiatives, which I find surprising. They need to be avoiding the mistakes they made with BT Transact, and getting their marketing properly in gear. I agree with Dennis that BT Workspace has the potential to be one of the big events of 2007. If you couple that together with their Marketplace, the two provide a significant boost to the SaaS topic’s credibility and visibility in the UK marketplace, which has got to be good for all of the SaaS players.
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