Transparency enables enterprise clients to achieve major telephony cost savings, maintain service quality – opens up new market opportunities

BT and Soft-ex®, a leading global provider of advanced Voice Management Solutions, have announced that the two companies will join forces to deliver Enterprise Communications Management (ECM) to large enterprise clients.

Launched at the Institute of Directors in London, the new partnership agreement, in which BT has appointed Soft-ex® as its No 1 ECM provider, builds on the existing successful relationship between the two companies, as Soft-ex® has been a BT Portfolio Partner since 2004.

“At a time of economic stringency, our enterprise clients in particular are looking to manage and control their fixed and mobile telephony costs - which continues to represent one of the biggest areas of corporate expenditure – without compromising service quality,” confirms BT Head of IP Sales, Stephen Richardson.

“As a result of this strategic agreement, we are providing real differentiation in the market by providing complete transparency of all telephony costs across the enterprise at the desktop. For the first time therefore, customers can see – and so control and reduce – telephony costs.

“The importance of this development has been underlined by leading industry analyst, Gartner, who predicts a 40 per cent CAGR over the next two years for ECM, which it describes as “one of the hottest growth sectors in the telecoms industry.”

According to Ovum, the top 1500 UK companies will need a ECM solution and the ECM market in the UK is expected to grow 25-30% pa over next 3-5 years”.

Stephen Richardson comments, “Soft-ex®’s experience, expertise and track record of high-quality service delivery makes them the ideal partner for inclusion in our IPT growth program for meeting the exacting demands of BT’s key clients in this specialised, yet increasingly mission-critical, ECM niche. In particular, we were attracted by the strength and versatility of Optimiser ECM® and already have a number of joint clients who are benefiting from significant cost savings and infrastructure and performance improvements.”

For his part, Soft-ex CEO, Ian Sparling believes: “Our established footprint as a long-standing BT partner - and our extensive experience in voice management for both fixed and mobile in a unified comms environment - will enable us to continue to supply our joint customers with strategic and high-value propositions.

“The synergies resulting from this partnership will also allow us to access new revenue streams and exploit new market sectors,” he says.