30 Minute Interview

Coming to India

Maggy McClelland, President, Strategy & Development, BT Global Services talks to Prashant L Rao about BTGS’ plans for India that include a joint venture, BT’s $20 billion bet on the 21st Century Network, and its mobile data offerings including Fusion, which is currently available only in the UK. Allen Ma, President, BT Asia-Pacific, and C S Rao, Managing Director, BT India chipped in with APAC- and India-specific information.

Maggy McClelland

As for the joint venture in India, BT has lodged applications with the Indian Department of Telecommunications for national long distance and international long distance licences. When granted, the licences will enable BT’s newly-formed joint venture company, BT Telecom India Pvt Ltd, to offer services for the first time directly to multi-site corporate customers in the Indian market.

What services do BT’s existing customers avail of? Will the JV enable BT to value-add to these or sell wholly new services to customers?

McClelland: BTGS is focussed on the enterprise market. We service MNCs, viz. global ICT companies. India is important to us for two reasons. First, from the supply-side we have been buying services from India for many years; BT accounts for two percent of the Indian BPO / ITeS industry. Second, we look at this country as a market wherein we serve global customers operating in India as well as large Indian BPO / ITeS organisations. Bharti-Airtel is our local partner.

The JV enables us to directly offer services to customers. Our partners provide domestic services. The JV will replace the current go-to-market mechanism to service the needs of our customers within India. Globally we are signing up 200 customers a quarter. A lot of our customers are seeking to relocate their operations in India. We are also looking to tap new customers in India, especially Indian MNCs—Indian companies that are extending their businesses into global markets.

Ma: We are sourcing local connectivity from Bharti.

McClelland: We don’t intend to compete in the domestic market except in the UK.

Rao: The top thousand companies listed on the Indian stock exchanges have multi-site, multi-national offices. They need different classes of service at different locations. BT has set up the 21st Century Network, which is MPLS-enabled, to serve Indian customers as well as the established BT base (60 percent of the Fortune 500 and 80 percent of FTSE Index).

McClelland: We’ve made a $20 billion investment in the 21st Century Network. It’s a software layer that sits on top of the pipe transforming it from a dumb pipe into an intelligent platform that lets us offer a deeper set of services such as networked storage. These things have traditionally sat on a server—we embed these in the network. Our customers are looking to run business-critical applications 24x7 around the world.

There’s a lot happening vis-a-vis mobile data. What kind of solutions does BTGS offer in the mobile data space?

McClelland: On the mobile front we want to be able to offer a customer solution that can be accessed through any device on a managed service basis.

Ma: We have an offering called Fusion. This is a consumer and corporate solution that offers VoIP and GSM coverage through a single handset that uses Bluetooth to connect to a broadband gateway for VoIP while you’re at home and GSM when outside. That’s the consumer version and it’s been launched in the UK and the service already has over 100,000 subscribers. The corporate version of Fusion uses Wi-Fi instead of Bluetooth. We aren’t offering Fusion in Asia, yet. In the APAC, mobility means more than voice. E.g. We manage 5,000 BlackBerrys for Reuters. Multimedia contact centre is another interesting solution from BTGS. Here the voice pipe and the data pipe are combined.

McClelland: For financial services companies we have a trading room solution. We pioneered this combination of voice and data in the financial sector.