You often wonder what old-style telcos mean when they get feisty. But what could be more feisty than a product launch dubbed “BT disrupts traditional integration market”?

OK, let’s go with the chutzpah: “in today’s extended enterprise, many organisations need to integrate business-critical information across core processes, multiple channels and geographies. However, this places significant demands on an organisation’s resources across the life-cycle of an integration project. Traditional approaches typically require expensive, long-running projects that involve large numbers of highly skilled people.”

Stefan Van Overtveldt, vice president for IT Transformation in BT Global Services said: “we are seeing a major transformation in how integration is achieved across the enterprise with business drivers such as globalisation, agility and supply chain visibility resulting in an increasing need to connect, route and intelligently handle data at the edge of an organisation.”

“The emergence of open standards, web services, and technologies such as Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) combined with the evolution of the network should allow companies to interconnect disparate systems in far more efficient ways.”

“However, the industry is largely focussed on selling software – this creates a huge gap between what you buy and the solution you implement to address needs. This is a costly approach in terms of up-front investment and skills required, and we see this proving increasingly difficult to support with the business drivers that most organisations now face.”

Stefan concludes, “BT’s approach is disruptive in so far as it takes a holistic view of business and technical requirements for integration, providing a flexible managed service where required, and charged so as to reflect specific project needs.”

Disruptive/holistic
Pocket analysts are brought aboard by BT to speak of “functional, standards-based integration technology” and “sophisticated service management environments that provide end to end support with simplified, business transaction level interfaces and policy driven management and controls”.

BT is strongly supportive of its services, which it delivers through, it says:
“• Hardware integration appliances that are deployed where required within a customer’s existing private network .
• Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) integration technology which is embedded inside each hardware appliance. This technology is provided through BT’s relationship with Sonic Software;
• A centralised management portal which allows customers to configure BT Integrate and monitor service performance;
• A team of experts that provide the necessary skills to design and deliver customer specific solutions over the integration lifecycle encompassing Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) development, infrastructure optimisation, training and change management;
• 24/7 operations support delivering implementation, pro-active management, service assurance and backup.”

Too much smeary language? ESB, SOA, 24/7? That’s just about as holistic as it gets when you are a dominant carrier.
Jim Chalmers