BT plans growth with new showcase, cloud services

British Telecom has opened a customer showcase in Sydney in an effort to woo more enterprises to its new cloud infrastructure and services portfolio as the company celebrates 25 years in Australia.

The Sydney showcase is the sixth globally after London and New York and the fourth of five planned for the Asia Pacific region.

BT has a big name internationally, but its local marketing efforts have been almost exclusively targeted at multinationals with offices in Australia because of its global footprint.

Managing director of BT Australasia, Paul Migliorini, said the company is a leading supplier of network solutions to multinationals in Australia, but is looking to engage with more local CIOs to expand into the enterprise.

“The Asia Pacific region is the leading global market for growth and we will be looking to hire some 50 people in Australia over the next couple of years,” Migliorini said.

BT services the top 400 to 500 multinationals and its enterprise businesses is serviced through channel partners.

Migliorini said the top 30 to 40 multinationals in Australia have been targeted as its core market and the company has long-standing direct relationships with those CIOs.

“We need to position our brand as a leading services and solutions company and the professional services dialogue at the CIO level is most important.”

Among BT’s new range of solutions is a hosted contact centre, which was made available to the local market late last year and will be officially launched in 2011.

The showcase was opened by Richard Morris, British consul general and director general of UK Trade Investment in Australia and New Zealand.

NBN good, not a priority

Migliorini said BT is not directly engaged with the NBN Co, but the two organisations do communicate regularly.

“It’s great to see this level of broadband investment from the government,” he said.

“The lack of domestic infrastructure is proving to be a bit of an impediment to investment.”

Migliorini said BT has an “open dialogue” with the NBN.