Background

As part of its Applications Hosting portfolio, BT delivers a set of products based on IBM Lotus Software. These include Lotus Domino (Mail, Application and Enterprise Server), Lotus Sametime, Lotus Quickr and Lotus Connections.

Through its business services division, BT delivers across the entire IP value chain with a unique blend of content hosting, application service provision, systems integration and outsourcing capabilities. Their acknowledged strengths as a leader in the IT services market, and their high quality application support and management skills combine to deliver maximum value to the end customer. BT has built an enviable combination of quality, skills and technology to deliver business critical services to customers.

BT's Business Need

BT sought a partner in the IBM Business Partner community to provide a highly skilled technical support team to work as an integrated part of the end-to-end managed service offerings from BT. The selection criteria required that the chosen partner must be able to add clear value to BT’s hosted Lotus applications, for both the user and BT themselves. The company chosen for this role was Applicable.

Business Benefits

The partnership with Applicable has helped BT to deploy high quality, cost-effective and easily available managed Lotus applications and solutions to customers.

BT has realised significant benefits from the engagement and integration of Applicable as a Managed Service Provider (MSP) in the delivery of its hosted Lotus applications. Most notably, BT has been able to:
 

• Enhance its high quality end-to-end application support and management
• Develop a successful ‘first time fix’ support service for its customers
• Successfully execute on their customer focused product strategy

The experience of Applicable as a managed service provider and accredited IBM Business Partner, combined with BT’s strength as a world class service provider, have proved a powerful and successful combination. 

As Neil Lock, at BT  says: "We have highly skilled support engineers talking directly to experienced customer personnel. The customers quickly appreciate the value and effectiveness of this approach".

Neil Lock says of the work carried out by Applicable: "Applicable is a seamless part of BT’s Lotus service offering. They provide a consistent and complementary extension to the BT delivery team."

Applicable consistently rate highly as a specialised part of the BT service, and are acknowledged particularly for their contributions in the following areas:

Helping to build customer satisfaction by consistent and regular communications

• Inspiring customer confidence with the specialised skills and experience available
• Simplifying customers’ support processes by providing a single point of contact for application monitoring, management and escalation

BT and Applicable continue to work together to deliver the latest IBM Lotus solutions to the managed services market. Customers can take advantage of the latest innovations in collaborative applications and e-learning as they become available, as well as being confident in the skills and experience of BT and Applicable with their class leading levels of customer service and support.