Eugene Grygo, Chief Content Editor, FTF News
In an odd marriage of old and new world technologies, BT may soon be mixing telephony with unified communications.
Trading rooms where special phones — known as turrets — are used by humans to complete transactions will likely be integrated with 21st century unified communication and collaboration technologies via BT’s pending acquisition of IP Trade SA.
To digress for a moment, like many traders and Ops personnel, I am a Baby Boomer (gray hair cannot hide that fact) and I know what a telephone is. Unlike some who were born after me, I like old-fashioned telephones and use them on a regular basis. (Here’s a news flash: one good phone call takes less time than multiple-guess text, chat and email messages. Try it.)
However, I embrace all new technology that improves the human condition such as unified communications (or UC).
UC has become an umbrella term that Wikipedia says encompasses “instant messaging (chat), presence information, voice (including IP telephony), mobility features (including extension mobility and single number reach), audio, web and video conferencing, fixed-mobile convergence (FMC), desktop sharing, data sharing (including web connected electronic interactive whiteboards), call control and speech recognition with non-real-time communication services such as unified messaging (integrated voicemail, e-mail, SMS and fax).”
So, I was suitably intrigued when BT officials announced last week that they want to add IP Trade’s advanced Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) communications to its offerings for trading floor environments. (This combination is also going to be pitched to command-and-control dispatch centers where lives are at stake.) IP Trade’s solutions merge voice, data, and streaming media into a single platform. IP Trade also offers integration with voice recording platforms from Alcatel, Avaya and Cisco Systems.
The acquisition is “subject to certain conditions, including regulatory clearance, and is expected to complete in the first quarter of 2017,” BT officials say. “The acquisition is underpinned by BT’s Cloud of Clouds portfolio strategy and underlines its continued investment in voice trading and turret solutions.”
BT officials also say the combination promises to provide customers with ways to optimize cost of ownership, flexible cloud-based deployment options, and operational agility. Trading room end-users (and presumably those Ops armies that support the traders) “will be better able to meet demanding regulatory compliance obligations, use proactive surveillance solutions to prevent market abuse, and improve collaboration between customers, colleagues and trading partners.”
In particular, combining BT’s considerable technology arsenal with IP Trade’s wares will lead to solutions that help manage: streaming media, IP-based telecommunication such as VoIP-based trading turrets, links between the cloud and on-premise solutions, controls from a wide range of devices that can be applied to the aforementioned turrets, software clients and regular office phones, officials say.
That is a lot to come from one acquisition.
“Our customers will appreciate the way we will bring together BT’s Cloud of Clouds portfolio strategy, products and expertise, managed services capability and global reach with IP Trade’s open software platform and range of devices and applications,” Luis Alvarez, CEO Global Services BT, promises in a prepared statement. “We are fully committed to maintaining and supporting our existing customers through delivery of BT’s own and IP Trade solutions against our product roadmap.”
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