I'm sure if I were a BCG strategy consultant I'd have a much deeper (and PPT rich) understanding of the threats to the global broadband carriers, but in general I believe there are three big ones driven by the shift to web-centric buying, selling, communicating, etc. My three are:
- Communications Tools (Skype, GrandCentral) that sit on top of the broadband carrier's network and replace their traditional telephony and dial-tone services
- SaaS applications that sit on top of the carrier's network and reduce the perceived value of their bandwidth (to be further threatened by things like WiMax)
- Local search tools (Google) that sit on top of the carrier's network and replace the advertising revenue they get from the business directory/Phonebook
I think the carriers have to continue to respond to these core threats and innovate around the web-centric components that create value along these axis to remain relevant and competitive.
British Telecom has had a couple of product updates in the past few weeks that do an interesting job of addressing these threats, including:
BT Tradespace - The search functionality of BT Tradespace (www.bttradespace.com) underwent a major facelift recently to provide a pretty interesting cross-Tradespace site search that touches on content, featured listings, content by rating, content by date and more. Go and type 'art' or something in the search box and you'll see what I mean. This is an interesting web 2.0 / traditional directory hybrid and, if BT can convince folks that they ARE the original phone book and therefore they ARE the place on the web to find businesses, then they can step in between a lot of the local search engines and take a cut of the advertising revenue businesses are willing to pay to be in front of online searches.
Additionally, each Tradespace site now includes the option to turn on Paypal commerce. This is effectively an online shopping cart in a box for small businesses (though clearly VERY simple) and represents a possible step to pushing aside a lot of the selling competition from things like Yahoo! Stores or Google Checkout.
BT Workspace - This collaboration platform underwent a major overhaul on Monday with the launch of 'v3'. The product now has integrated presence and IM which should be the first step toward broader communications integration (VoIP calling, Audio Conferencing, Web Conferencing, Desktop Sharing, etc.). What's interesting about this is it capitalizes on the known strengths of the carrier (communications!) but delivers those tools within the context of a business application that rides on top of the evolved broadband. The presence/IM functionality is clientless, meaning it is fully SaaS and doesn't require the end user to install any software. This is designed to hit the IT-less small business market with a solution that feels like it is an application 'on the cloud'.
I would expect more and more carriers to look for how their traditional communications and network assets can be used to enable specific business applications and processes as part of their offerings. To see for yourself, go to www.btworkspace.com, read the blog entry at http://blog.btworkspace.com or take a test spin at http://signup.btworkspace.com.