BT's 90 Day Cycles Startle People

BT now operates on 90-day development cycles for applications, including the time needed to prepare a business case, says Dave Axam, BT director of transformation. In some cases, as you would suspect, more than a single cycle might be required for a single project.

But that sort of speed seemed to startle many delegates at the MetaSwitch Forum, many of whom are independent telcos, rural cooperatives, competitive local exchange carriers, cable companies and other associated with those ecosystems.

But Axam says BT is serious about that sort of adaptation to a world running "at Google speed." He was given the assignment of launching voice over IP for BT "in three months." Axam says he discovered early on that Session Initiation Protocol is a bit like English--one has to know which variant of the dialect is being used--and that has taught BT much about the pitfalls of relying exclusively on such "standards."

All of that seemed to provoke some anxiety on the part of delegates, who may well have been wondering how well they'll fare in a world that requires innovation at that sort of speed, with the relationships and assets such speed would seem to require. BT, after all, created a developer community, a software development kit, feedback, response and interaction capabilities as part of the overall effort.

"But one of the hardest things is the commercial wrap," says Axam. That means the ability to intgrate new applications, many with some sort of tie to the Web, with the rest of BT's services.

One delegate, who seemed to agree with the characterization of where things were headed, nevertheless expressed the obvious point that "I don't think we are going to be putting together third-party developer groups" to do this sort of thing.

Anxiety? Yes, for many reasons. The integration of Web with telephony, the increasing importance of software-mediated experiences, the growing technological complexity of the business overall and the different assets required, may well be disadvantages for whole classes of competitors, even as the trends favor larger, wealthier companies.

All of that simply creates new opportunities for aggregators of applications, though. Still, as another delegate put it, "I'm not sure how comfortable I am with putting my widget on an iGoogle page."

But that might be a more viable avenue than trying to "force" customers to a service provider portal, as beneficial as that might be for the service provider.