BT and Microsoft getting together on conferencing software

Rethink IT, Sept, 2004

BT is taking a shot at the enterprise and small business conferencing market in a tie-up with Microsoft. The idea is to offer its own voice conferencing service alongside a hosted Live Meeting service so that Powerpoint and other presentations can be presented to up to several 1,000 recipients, at once, with full voice facilities.

This type of conferencing is big business in the US with internal, dedicated systems and conference bureaux being used regularly, and Microsoft announced a similar deal with MCI about a month ago.

Mike Berry, head of strategic planning for BT Conferences, part of BT Retail, said, "For every video conference that we organize there are 1,000 voice conferences.

"This is a 'pence per minute' service, so we require no upfront commitment on the number of conference minutes that an enterprise will use, although if a company does commit to an upfront volume, we will offer a discounted price," said Berry. The pricing starts at 20 pence per user per minute.

BT has been a user internally of Placeware for years. This was then bought by Microsoft and renamed Live Meeting.

The company will now merge the Live Meeting services with its own MeetMe phone conferencing service, built primarily around the Voyant phone conferencing equipment, a company now owned by video conferencing player Polycom.

BT plans to offer the service in its native UK and Europe and also in the US, where it will meet more entrenched competition including MCI.

MCI's service available today in both the UK and US with Europe and other markets to follow.

During an internal pilot in BT, the company said the use of the combined audio and web system saved the company more than 6.2m miles of business travel, using video alongside its current internal MeetMe audio conferencing.

The service offers rapid account set-up, real time web-based support, new multiple presenter capability, text-based Q&As and side chat discussions, as well as offering training on how to best use the service.

Microsoft and BT said they will work together to develop additional communication and collaboration services to bring to market.

"We have integrated Outlook so that you have buttons for 'meet now' and 'schedule meetings in advance', and it automatically puts the conference sign on details into meeting schedules," explained Berry.

"The system also works with Lotus Notes and authorized users can download the meeting set-up buttons and go straight to setting up their own meetings."

The Live Meeting part of the service is actually ultimately hosted by Microsoft for BT.

This follows the announcement in June where the two companies launched BT Broadband Office Complete, aimed to be a hassle-free suite of broadband-based business tools offering broadband access, security and online data back, copies of Office applications and a hosted copy of Exchange for email.