Q&A: Jerry Thompson, BT Business

Jerry Thompson, director of products and online, BT Business

Jerry Thompson spoke to vnunet.com about cloud computing, and the challenges facing customers as the recession bites.

vnunet.com: BT is often viewed as a vast and complex organisation. What areas does your role cover?
Jerry Thompson: We focus mainly on the small and medium sized market in the UK, which includes volume products like business broadband, calls and lines, and then value-added services. We offer a broad range of tools and applications to enable businesses to do business better, like email, hosting, data backup and security, storage and hosted applications like customer relationship management. Increasingly businesses are looking at hosted services which they buy on a monthly basis. It's a fast growing business for us. Then there is the IT services group, which provides solutions such as IT support manager. Here, we're trying to be the IT department for businesses who don't have one.

Will the outcome of the Carter review present challenges or opportunities for BT?
All we want is the freedom to invest and get a return on that investment. We've engaged the competition for the last 28 years and think there's an opportunity for significant investment in fibre for the UK, but we want the environment to be fair so that if we make that investment we'll get a reasonable return.

How is the growth of the software-as-a-service (SaaS) market likely to play out? Will it replace proprietary software completely in time?
The trend of SaaS, with its automatic updates, low unit costs, easy renewal of software from a licensing perspective and per-user costs, is really taking off. It's becoming a very interesting market and a logical one for us to play in because of the way it's delivered and billed. There is a place for the [in-house] server and a place for hosted systems, and lots of small businesses have a server in the main office and a hosted environment in subsidiary offices. The only reason why there aren't more hosted products out there is because of the supply side of the industry. Microsoft, Oracle, Sage and others haven't written the code yet, and have a model based on boxed software, but that's changing.

Does this brave new world of SaaS include mobile applications?
Yes, mobile applications are just over the horizon for everyone. Mobile is becoming a factor for choosing SaaS. If you don't have a mobile story for your core applications, there will be question marks. Phones are used for so much more than calls today, because the web interface has improved. Apple has shown how you can create mobile applications which work well on the mobile and on fixed devices.

How are your customers reacting to the recession?
Well, none of them have increased budgets. While every year they expect more for less, this year they expect substantially less, and they are trying to go further without investing in new equipment like PBXs. The question mark in a lot of firms' minds is should I be buying any hardware when everything is going to be in the cloud? We're seeing a real desire for more information about cloud computing. On the software side, there are increasing concerns about data and the viability of suppliers. The worry is if I buy software from this company, will they be here in six months' time?