BT Workspace launched last week to virtually no fanfare SME Director provided the briefest of reports, which was parroted in ZDNet UK, a sister title. Other than that, no-one took much notice. I don’t know who’s responsible. A technology obsessed media , enamoured only by the latest, shiniest software as a service or BT’s marketers. I suspect it’s a bit of both.
BT is not using next generation social software as most people think about it today. It has no RSS, no blog, no wiki, no integrated office style applications. Even if you’re a SaaS purist with a love for all things WordPress and Technorati, stick with me. They are changing the game. And if they play this one right, will be a disruptive force in the market. Who would have said that about BT?
It has some smart one liners. Check out one of the straplines in the tour: Simple, powerful, inexpensive. Did we miss anything? It’s press release hit a few hot spots:
Co-workers, customers or partners can help themselves to status updates of projects or associated documents instead of having to keep contacting the project manager. This means an end to the endless string of e-mails choking up Inboxes with countless responses to business issues and opportunities. And it will also call a halt to the nightmare of controlling different versions of documents as team members make additions and amendments. The end of poor project control and disjointed customer communication will help businesses avoid the loss of customers and revenue.
Don’t get carried away. As we shall see in Part 2, it sounds great but isn’t quite as it’s made out. But as a way of grabbing a reader’s attention, it works well. I guess it will be the wave of follow on advertising that will make the difference.
BT Workspace is an all-in-one-eat-all-you-like offering that provides a number of the tools SMBs need to collaborate with others in their business ecosystems. It is a first of a kind service from a major telco in the UK and represents an important milestone in the creation of business infrastructure services. It is far from perfect, some of it is plain ugly but it is enough to get people’s attention and meet simple needs. There’s enough to attract a sizable audience.
There is a lot to say so I’m dividing this discussion into two parts. This part talks about the business issues and an indication of where I think this goes next, who wins and who loses. In part two, I discuss the value of what’s on offer and how it compares with some (but not all) other services. There’s a lot to get through.
While Google is making a concerted foray into the business arena with Google Apps for Your Domain, there is an implicit assumption that your online presence is the only thing that counts. I know many people who know about Google Apps and love it. I’m unconvinced. There are plenty of businesses that don’t have a web presence and most of those that do are static affairs.
I’m concerned about confidentiality and the thought of running my entire business communications, including spreadsheets and HTML documents via Google’s monster data gathering machine worries me. BT offers secure access to its services in ‘intranet’ and ‘extranet’ fashion. BTs offering is comforting.
I suspect that despite Google’s apparent omnipresence, old fashioned marketing of the kind BT engages in could win the day. As the UKs largest telco, it’s in an incredible position to sweep up a lot of customers. Pricing is absolutely in the right ball park though you can try it out for free using the Lite, ad-supported version:
If you need additional users or extra storage space as your business grows then it’s simple to expand your BT Workspace.
Just £7.50 (excl VAT) per company user*
* 100MB space per user – pooled between all users
* Unlimited project workspaces – invite participants for FREE
* Extra storage available at £5 (excl VAT) per month per 1GB*minimum 2 paid users
Start off with your FREE BT Workspace Lite and upgrade as you need to within your workspace.
Who might be winners and losers here? Sage is a loser right off the bat. It has yet to offer a credible online service, and doesn’t have BTs marketing muscle. It hasn’t figured out how to reach this target market effectively and hasn’t announced an education plan for practitioners who might be persuaded. It still thinks in traditional marketing terms but could do so much better if it tried ‘viral.’ The reason it’s at risk is because it is the largest target available with cramped development resources. Google wins as it picks up those who want more than BT offers, are prepared to take the privacy risk and are more geeky in outlook. Microsoft could pick up some numbers with Office Live but it starts to look horribly expensive compared to BT and Google pretty quickly. Microsoft will argue functional richness and familiarity. OK – I can almost buy that. For the time being.
Depending on what BT does next, the logical progression is for business application service vendors like Zoho and Omnidrive to make overtures to BT. As Zoli points out:
I’ve long been saying that the attachment management functions the better enterprise wikis offer are nice, but they solve the problem based on yesterday’s technology. Instead of the upload>download>re-upload nightmare wouldn’t it be easier to work with the attachments directly online?
Having that level of rich business functionality within this type of offering would be welcome. In fact it will become a necessity within a short period of time. That’s because once people get used to using BT Workplace, they wont want to step outside the browser.
It needs an accounting engine, an e-commerce website plus a repository for application ‘glue’ components like Teqlets. Why? Because these are further peices of business infrastructure. Which BT is very good at delivering. Winweb could easily be a winner here. It offers much of what BT is proposing but with richer and deeper functionality. It has impressive adoption numbers but lacks the marketing clout and reach to clean up. I may of course be wrong but in this game, scale matters. Agility is not quite enough. There will be lots of winners because curiously, the way services are developing, it does not have to be a ‘winner takes all’ market.
So am I saying that BT has become a Google/Microsoft competitor? Why not. It makes sense for BT, as infrastructure owner for the UKs telecoms industry to leverage that every way it can. It already offers business services so why not take another step along that path?
Some may think I’m over egging the story and the fact it hasn’t been picked up by the blogerati makes it still born. That’s tragically narrow thinking. The biggest difference BT makes is in legitimising the SaaS delivery model for SMBs. In that sense alone, it matters not that the offering isn’t slap bang up to date. If anything, it creates tremendous opportunity, especially for those professionals smart enough to see where this goes. I’m hoping this will turn out to be one of the big events of 2007.
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