by Jeff Owen

BT Conferencing, a division within the BT Group, plc., develops, sells, and supports innovative audio, web, and video conferencing solutions to businesses ranging from large multi-national companies to small and medium enterprises.  A leading global provider of audio, video, web, and streaming collaboration services, with offices in the UK, US, and Asia Pacific, BT Conferencing services customers worldwide with reliable, robust and innovative conferencing solutions to some of the largest companies in the world.

Last week they announced an expansion of their channel partner program (see press release at http://www.telecomreseller.com/?p=25426 ) that will enable greater revenue potential for partners. Tim Passingham, BT Conferencing’s general manager for the Americas, said: “We believe we can more than double our reseller revenue in the next two to three years.”

I had the opportunity to speak with Passingham and Ken Velten, head of the channel partner program, about what this change means.  Velten stated that they’ve seen a strong market opportunity for resellers as evidenced by the number of new partners in just the last 6 months.  Additionally, there has been interest expressed by other resellers with several close to executing channel partner contracts.  Their recent announcement was essentially a public acknowledgement of BT Conferencing’s commitment to the re-invigoration of, and focus on, their channel partner program.

Given the competitive nature of the business I asked why potential partners would want to align with BT Conferencing vs. XYZ companies.  Venten replied the BT has a more tightly targeted and discretely focused sales effort in the U.S. compared to competitors.  “Our competition essentially goes after anything that moves and for a channel partner that creates a lot of issues.”  He went on to say that BT is unique in North America since they offer a full suite of managed services encompassing all of UC from audio, web conferencing, to managed video and global video exchange service.

Passingham added that BT Conferencing has several key differentiators including;

• One of the few who can support  audio, video, web, and streaming
• Worldwide capabilities
• More than a decade of experience in providing managed services
• Backed by the experience, strength, and stability of BT Group, plc. (an international carrier)

• BT Conferencing is Payment Card Industry (PCIDSS-v2.0) compliant.
• Dedicated service teams work to maintain the highest levels of customer satisfaction with 24x7x365 support.
• Web-enabled systems provide state-of-the-art provisioning and billing capabilities that are scalable and meet customers’ needs in real-time.
• End-user adoption and training programs that help employees work together effectively and productively.

Their managed, or cloud, services should be attractive to the SMB/SME market and is, in fact, one of the key areas they are developing through channel partners.  Additionally, partners can cover some vertical markets more effectively than BT’s internal sales efforts.  Thus, they are looking for partners who bring the skills, relationships, and geographic territories that help them fulfill their tag line, “Bringing it all together” (e.g. hardware retailers who need someone to provide the managed services; organizations needing help to go international). In other words, those partners with whom BT Conferencing can develop symbiotic relationships.

From an end customer perspective, BT Conferencing’s offerings fall squarely into the cloud services arena.  Therefore, they should be attractive to any organization wishing to migrate to the cloud, reduce their CAPEX, expand internationally, and/or improve their collaboration capabilities.

Interested channel partners can contact Ken Velten via e-mail at kenneth.velten@bt.com

More at http://www.btconferencing.com