Q&A: Jerry Thompson - BT Business director of business products and online

Thompson : Firms have always cried, "do more, for less"

As director of business products and online for BT Business, Jerry Thompson has seen at first hand the impact the recession has had on firms' business and IT plans.

Computing talked to Thompson about the technologies firms are turning to to help them ride out the economic storm.

Computing: What do your customers tell you is their top priority today?
Jerry Thompson: Well, the cry has always been "do more for less", even during the good years. But I've been in this industry over 20 years and I've never seen the problems quite as acute as they are now. It's not "twice as fast at half the cost" every few years, it's seriously taking fixed costs out of the business and finding new ways of doing things.

Does BT see software-as-a-service (SaaS) and cloud computing fitting into this cost-cutting agenda?
There's a number of strategic questions here, and when you go into a recession like we have at the moment, there are clues as to what the world will look like from a structural point of view when we come out of the other side. Everybody has indeed been talking about SaaS and cloud computing, but in essence people weren't doing it, whereas now they're really looking at it quite seriously and saying what does it mean for me?

We're seeing an increasing appetite for trialling this in discrete areas and seeing if it does work. There's a real push towards taking fixed costs and making them into variable ones, recognising that you may take 15-20 per cent of your organisation, but that you may want 15-20 per cent growth in a year or two. However, the financials currently may be inhibiting a massive change and movement towards these technologies at present

Which cloud computing services do you think will take off?
One thing we have noticed that corporates are going for is managing email. Outsourcing email management is not something corporate IT departments considered in the past - smaller companies, absolutely. What we're seeing is an interest - yet to be translated into a huge amount of orders - from North American firms with 15,000-20,000 employees in outsourcing email management to a hosting provider. Two to three years ago this would have been unheard of, and that's a real telling sign because email management is a core service for IT departments and it's quite a complex thing to run.

We're also offering customers SaaS CRM like Salesforce and SugarCRM, certainly for SMEs and mid-market companies, and managing IT support helpdesks.

I think large corporates will increasing look at these kinds of managed services over the next three to four years as a way of addressing IT cost management.

What are customers telling you is their biggest headache in the datacentre?
Power. I sit on Intel's board of advisers and a few years ago they said that the biggest issue will be power. They showed us some data about five years ago, and here we are today with Google building datacentres next to hydroelectric power plants. Power is the most important vulnerability for running datacentres today, and it also focuses attention on the need for having multiple power sources.

What about the market for videoconferencing and telepresence?
We're not seeing a massive adoption of videoconferencing – I wish it was otherwise. For big corporates it's a really useful tool for project work. I've seen research on videoconferencing that says its effectiveness is related to how well you know the person on the other side of the connection. If you know them, and you have a rapport with them, it's 60-80 per cent effective compared to a face-to-face meeting, but over time that figure diminishes. You need to keep the relationship fresh.