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NewsGlobe: Financial
IP Gives BT Business Motive for Change
U.K. Carrier Moves Broadband Management to Texas
by Jim Barthold
The ease and amorphous nature of IP has led BT to host its broadband customer self-help software in Motive’s Austin, Texas headquarters. The carrier expects to save about 500,000 pounds in personnel costs annually by having someone else manage its customer service software activities.
“We did a business case and (it) came up all positive hosting it out of Motive’s data center in the U.S. rather than hosting it out of our own data center in the U.K. That was a combination of immense capital investment we could defer and Motive skills available in their data center,” said Norman Street, Internet services programme director for BT Retail.
BT had previously hosted Motive’s software in its U.K. facilities, but when crunch time came, operational decisions about that software often fell back on Motive in Austin, said Kenny Van Zant, Motive’s executive vice president.
“We talked about it with them as far as location and at the end of the day, because it’s all delivered over the Internet and IP-based networking, it didn’t really matter where it was,” said Van Zant.
BT has licensed, from a software perspective, a very broad bit of Motive’s infrastructure for services like BT Yahoo!, a customer brand service where Motive’s software provides self-installation and self-help capabilities. Motive is also providing call center representatives a Web-based tool for troubleshooting and getting diagnostics to better solve problems, said Van Zant.
Both parties believe there will be no translation or distance difficulties with hosting the management activities in Texas for a customer base in the U.K.
“Certainly we were satisfied that there wouldn’t be any deterioration in the experience of the customer by being hosted out of the U.S.,” said Street. “They have the skills to handle it.”
The move is also not evidence that BT is planning to expand its services into the U.S. market, said Van Zant.
“It has nothing to do with them doing any kinds of services here in Texas,” he said. “We’ve done a good job building out our infrastructure here and the Internet activity has just matured to the point where there’s just no meaningful difference from a latency perspective between the two locations.”
It also is not necessarily a harbinger of a burgeoning relationship between the two companies, although that may come.
“Motive is an important platform for us as far as customer self-care is concerned and BT is, like all telcos, looking very seriously at its self-care strategy,” Street said. “Motive is one of the platforms that we are building into that strategy (but) there are some aspects of that still to be determined.”
It clearly is a selling tool for Motive to take a new approach to customers using its hosted facilities.
“Most people will use our hosted facility temporarily until their IT staff gets trained and then move it off site. Here is an operator saying they’ll save about 500,000 pounds a year in just manpower reduction from just not having to staff an IT organization dedicated to Motive but get advantages in time-to-market … and new features rolled in more quickly than they can do on their own,” said Van Zant. “It’s an interesting potential trend (and) a testament to the fact that these kinds of management services can be deployed anywhere and delivered worldwide in the network.”
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