With the support of customers, BT aims to maximize the potential of its traditional business, through a combination of enhanced quality of service, creative marketing, innovative pricing, and cost efficiency. Interacting with VOICE&DATA, Francois Barrault, CEO, BT Global Services, talks about various issues regarding the present market situation, his love for India and more. Excerpts:

Many companies like C&W, Verizon, and local players like Tata Communications and Reliance Globalcom are entering the network IT space. Did BT enter this market by mistake?
No, it was a well-planned strategy. I think you know the story. The UK had 89,000 DSL lines and the culture was not focused on customers, so we had to do something. The first three years of my job in BT were focused on aggregating, rationalizing, and growing. We bought twenty-eight companies and twenty-five were out of the UK. I wanted to take the next step and position BT as a business operator for our customers.

What do you mean by a business operator?
The world no longer works on the traditional customer/supplier model. We designed the business operator approach to help businesses that now rely on informal and collaborative interaction in multiple industries and countries.

We give our customers speed, innovation, creativity, and flexibility wherever they are in the world. A business operator must be able to deliver all the networked IT services that underpin mission critical, but non-core business processes. What use is a supplier who can't adapt when enterprises, as they must, change direction? A business operator adapts without hesitation.

BT has been pursuing this vision for three years with technology innovation, organic growth, and acquisitions. We now have flexibility, reach, and skills required to support customers, when they need us, on their journey through an unpredictable world.

Professional and IT services are your best points. What are you doing to strengthen these services?
Professional services (PS) involve providing advisory services, best practices, and technology suited to the needs of our customers. PS give us an edge over our competitors as it enables us to offer the best possible solutions to our customers by understanding their needs. We offer a wide range of services on a consultancy basis to cover every aspect of business communications. We specify and explain the services recommended to meet the needs.

As Indian corporates surge ahead to match the best in the world, their communication and IT systems will also have to move up the value chain. We want to enable Indian companies to become global. Professional services enable all communications strategy, planning, design, infrastructure, networking, security, applications and training needs of a business.

Are you entering the domains of IBM and EDS?
No, because we don't compete a lot with IBM-because we don't do it, we don't go for pure IT. My view is that network is more important than physical storage. Selling PC is not our business.

Has the global economic trend affected your business?
No, it has boosted it. I was really cool about it because there was a credit crunch; as a result, I needed to sell more in India to compensate. Also, it is more of a correction rather than a recession. Moreover, there is a kind of collective mindset that the US is not the center of the world.

When we go to India, we are bullish about what is going on there and those fair value growth opportunities for new emerging consumers. And when I talk to our global customers, it is just reallocation of assets and focus. So we don't see this as a big issue at present. We see this as an opportunity. And this will be a great growth opportunity in select parts of the world, and that is what we are going to focus on.

BT is looking at customer service as a key differentiator...
Customer service is key to any business and across any sector; as a matter of fact, when we look at choosing a partner or any kind of service, we first gauge their customer service and the breadth of the delivery. It is clear that this is what will finally hold BT firmly ahead of the game, and is transforming to be a customer centric organization. When it comes to delivering a service to a customer, we ensure that we get it right the first time.

BT is known to be in a transformation phase. How is it going and do you see local mobile players in India like Bharti and Vodafone also transforming once the India mobile story starts to flatten out?
BT's transformation is a case study for most organizations and not just for telecom companies. Our customers are happy as we are shaping our business systems and processes to provide the best service delivery.

India seems to have done well in the mobility space. But broadband penetration here is very low. Even the quality of enterprise infrastructure is not always world-class. India needs to improve this if you have the appetite for the global market in these areas. Today, several organizations like banks are moving to virtualization as they decentralize their operations. To capture more data center business, you need to build high level of resilience in your networks.

Most Indian telecom companies like Bharti and Tata are creating enterprise and global service divisions, this is excellent for the competitive landscape as we believe in collaborating and competing.

A lot of companies are talking about climate change and global warming, and are talking green? What's BT doing regarding it?
We have been involved in this since 1996. We have reduced our carbon emissions by almost 60% in the last ten years. For reducing carbon emissions, I strongly advocate the use of videoconferencing for board meetings.

As far as possible, I try to conduct my meetings using videoconferencing. In France, I usually work from home and tell others to do the same whenever possible.

You are quite fascinated by India and you saw that a lot of development was taking place here. What major changes did you see in India?
What fascinates me about India is that the people have not lost their tradition. As a French, I respect traditions and families, and it's important that people never forget who they are. In some countries, people are more like machines, you know, here they are human. I think Indians are very nice people. They are very proud of their roots, but this pride is different from that of some countries where it (pride) takes the form of arrogance.

Sandeep Budki
sandeepb@cybermedia.co.in

Page(s)   1