Wall Street Crash: Upcoming Telco Chaos

With the sudden and forced mergers of some of the worlds largest financial institutions, Telco and ISP major accounts teams will be preparing themselves for several months of travel, client meetings and late nights as they try to make sense of their position in the combined entities.

As overnight bags are stuffed and expense forms dusted off; here are some highlights of the fun to come.

Lloyds TSB has strong links to both C&W and BT.However, the major accounts team at C&W will be less than pleased to find that BT's position has been enhanced by virtue of BT being IP Services provider of choice at HBOS.
On the voice & legacy data side, things are likely to be more complicated, as with 3yrs still to run on Lloyds $1Bn outsource agreement with IBM, you can be sure that the IBM account team will be lobbying hard to get access to HBOS' branch network; currently supplied by "...strategic partner, BT"

Tiscali brands innocent customer criminal

Two articles caught my eye this week on the proposed EU Telecoms's package, a law that if passed, will effectively mean that ISPs will become unwilling Enforcers for the Digital Rights lobby.

The first is the surprise involvement of the European Data Protection Agency, whose Supervisor has come out against the act, stating that parts of it relating to the tracing of IP addresses, breaks existing EU data protection legislation, enabling the mass surveillance of Internet users. If true the ISPs will be spending a lot of money on legal fees.

The second proves that there will be trouble ahead for ISPs. It appear that Tiscali wrote to a chap accusing him of illegally downloading a TV show. OK, but this chap isn't a customer of theirs; he had left them a year before and his old IP address had been dropped back into the pool. The cause "Computer error" Nothing to worry about then, that hardly ever happens.

Imagine the damage to Tiscali's Brand, had it gone all the way to the guy being permanently expelled from the Internetit would have made national/international news; it's the modern equivalent of having your eyes put out...

New Heatmap feature shows installed services

Following customer feedback we have added a new Heatmap feature to the BackChannel Account Manager. This makes it possible to see not just where your customers offices are located, but where they have services installed.


This screen shot from within the application shows where HBOS have their primary IP services installed.

Google polishes up Chrome to support GoogleApps

Whilst it has been slow to take off in Europe and the rest of the World, GoogleApps for Business have been as huge success in the US. In Mid 2007 we electronically surveyed 550k US companies to see who was using GoogleApps mail services and it hardly hit the Radar.


Re-running the Survey in Mid 2008 the results couldn't have been more different. GoogleApps had arrived, and the demographic is right in the heart of the US business, companies with between 20-250 employees.

You're probably all Google Chrome'd out by now but a significant part of the Chrome announcement is that it has an application development kit called Gears that allows Web App Developers; like ourselves, Salesforce, etal, to build Off-line features into our products, making them portable.

For Google, this means that users of GoogleApps for Business will soon be able to compose a Gmail that includes a GoogleApps Spreadsheet sitting on a plane, and have it sync up and send as soon as they are connected to the Internet again.