Andrew Small, BTGS General Manager for Contact Centre and Hosted Services says that BT’s new hosted telephony service is aimed at large Enterprises mainly in the government sector and that these customers, by their very nature, are dealt with directly by BT.
Small also confirmed that BT already has some 50,000 users connected to their Nortel CS2000 based IP telephony platform and that Nortel are switching over six major sites every night from Featureline to the new service.
“This new hosted telephony service will be productised and formally launched in January 2008,” said Small, adding, “Featureline, which is based on TDM architecture, will continue to be available and be sold by channel partners.”
Featureline currently has, according to BT, more than 1million users. All the larger enterprise users are to be offered an upgrade to the new IP based service.
Small concluded, “Working with Nortel for hosted IP telephony will enable our users to readily move to a unified communications set up more easily – especially given Nortel’s strong alliance with Microsoft.”
BT has located their CS2000 platform in two secure sites and believes they are the only company able to offer the level of resilience and security that enterprise customer’s demand.