BT is looking to increase its hold on the U.K. corporate market with an "affordable" all-in-one unified IP services and CRM solution that aims to bring to a wide enterprise audience the kind of contact center functionality normally restricted to large companies.

BT believes it can create new revenues totalling £2.5 billion (US$3.6 billion) from this line of business by 2004-2005 through its BT Retail sales force of 6,000. It already claims to have 25% of the U.K. CRM systems market, equating to annual revenues of £800 million ($1,154 million).

'Contact Central' is a pre-integrated product that pulls together standard telephony, IP switching, hardware and software, with Siebel's Call Center software playing "a pivotal role." The product allows the user to handle (with or without a traditional PBX) voice, fax, e-mail and Internet communications through one system that does not require costly systems integration or desktop PC upgrades. It also enables multi-location operations, including agents who work from home and remote locations.

Part of the agreement sees BT becoming a reseller of Siebel's eBusiness applications in the U.K.

BT claims the system can be deployed as quickly as 25 days, simply requires the system to be hooked up to an ISDN line, and is affordable for small and medium-sized companies, organizations and government departments. The telco claims it already has two as yet unnamed users of the product, both of which have signed 30-seat deals at a cost of about £200,000 (US$288,500).

The "ecosystem" of partners BT has pulled together for this solution includes Nortel Networks, Accenture, Avaya, Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, Genesys, Extraprise, MarketBridge and CosmoCom.

And it seems Melville, New York-based CosmoCom's universal access IP platform was central to the technology underpinning BT's product. "CosmoCom's open architecture made it the ideal selection for the ACD and IVR component of Contact Central," said Contact Central product manager Paul White. "[Its] CosmoCall Universe...gives small and medium-sized companies access to a degree of interoperability between ACD, IVR and CRM that would otherwise be available only from high-priced systems integrators."

Pierre Danon, CEO of BT Retail, which sells services to consumer and corporate customers in the U.K., sees this as an opportunity to extend BT's brand and grow new revenue streams. "We have learned from our own mistakes in CRM, and have a lot of experience to pass on to our customers," he told a meeting in London.

Danny McLaughlin, managing director of BT Major Business, a division of BT Retail, said BT has been using Siebel's CRM solutions itself - "We have been eating a lot of our own dog food this year" - and found that "it has led to higher revenues and happier customers."

Tom Siebel, chairman and CEO of Siebel Systems Inc., proclaimed this announcement as "a big event," and said it was "addressing a demand chain problem," brought about by people wanting to engage with companies through multiple channels, at any time and from any place. "Until now this type of system has been unavailable to the middle market. You call BT, they bring in the system, they install it and it works. This is a major breakthrough in technology," added Siebel.

Danon added that there was already "a lot of interest from SMEs and from government departments," and that the key from BT's viewpoint was the affordability to corporates.

Indeed, Jon Meredith, finance and sales director for the Contact Central team at BT, said the telco was already talking to customers looking for as few as five seats for such a system, and that the average price per seat would usually be between £3,000 and £7,000 ($4,330 and $10,100) plus variable ongoing support costs.