Ignore BT at your own peril!!!

I had blogged about the growing influence of British Telecom and had ended the post with the statement.

They used to be a saying in the imperialistic days of the British ” The Sun never sets in the British Empire”. I believe we are going to see “The sun never sets in the British Telecom empire” and boy am I looking forward to that!!!

As I predicted, the rise has begun. BT has bought INS inc, a California based company that is a leader in providing support services across multi-vendor network equipment. ( Most people might remember this company as the one that was bought over by Lucent in 1999).

I had also mentioned in my post

 BT’s global services is becoming a serious player and we can start seeing them being catalysts for this transformation across the globe.

BT Global Services so far as had four major acquisitions in the last couple of years. Infonet Corp, Radianz, Counterpane and now INS.

It is very curious to note that most in the Telecom community (blogging or otherwise) seem to be focussed on the Verizons and the Ma Bells of North America and BT is always an afterthought. Even this acquisition news has not been picked up by the blogging community which is very surprising. There is a very good post by Thomas Anglero where he talks about how the VoIP community is closed. Probably it is closed when it comes to reporting about other Telecom providers as well!!.  Is there a North American prejudice? I would love to know what you think. The major VoIP commentators, atleast the ones I read (Om, Saunders, Andy, Tehrani, Jon Arnold) are all based out out of North America. Maybe it is time we got some European perspective as well.

Having said that, it would be very imprudent to ignore British Telecom. They will be the ones who shall redefine telecom for next generation services and they are already way ahead of others.You can have the fancy iphones in North America, but the real action is in Europe.  And I restate, Ignore BT at your own peril!!!