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By Tony Hallett, 12 June 2003 15:13

NEWS BT has placed a big bet on companies finally being ready for converged IT and communications, creating a dedicated business unit and renewing its vows with some of the biggest communications equipment makers. Tom Craig, formerly director of BT Business Information Systems, will head the new unit, BT Convergent Solutions. The telco claims that from day one this will be Europe's largest IP convergence business. BT Retail CEO Pierre Danon said the company will continue to work alongside key partners Avaya, Cisco and Nortel - and "make sure [sales people] are vendor agnostic at the point of sale". Following a far-reaching deal with Visa CEMEA last month, covering countries across Africa and Europe, including all of Russia, BT has announced new customers for converged IP services including Lehman Brothers (using Cisco kit), HBOS and analyst house Datamonitor, using an MPLS-based IP network. The market for enterprise IP telephony alone is predicted to grow to $4.4bn in 2006 from $849m in 2002 according to figures from Synergy Research. BT sees its convergence push as a key part of its overall ICT services strategy. It calculates it will make £2.2bn in its fiscal year from services, which compares well to the £2.5bn EDS is likely to make in the UK, for example. Danon said: "We should stay humble [on this progress] but there is no need to be masochistic. [Brand research has shown] we are seen as safe and trustworthy and in this day and age CIOs are very sensitive to that." Using a recent Sainsbury's contract win as an example - when the telco worked with Accenture, as it has worked in other instances with CSC and Computacenter - Danon said it was possible to roll out converged technologies at each shop site in under two hours. "We're not like an IBM or EDS," Danon said. "We know we can't do it all ourselves." However, the company does claim to have tried much of what it is preaching, including server-stored desktops that follow employees wherever they log on, multimedia webinars and more. Chris Price, BT Exact COO - basically an IT director - used the company recently clocking up its one millionth broadband subscriber as an example of convergent technologies. He said that at the time, besides noting the user who signed up - it was a charity - BT also wanted to find the sales person. "We couldn't find them," he said. "We found that it had all been done with zero human touch points."