BT claims medium-sized businesses are underserved

Medium sized business as a collective are not being adequately served, according to BT.

Speaking at BT's Business Experience event in London, Jerry Thompson, director of products and online for BT Business, said: "The 50-250 employee group is a real sweet spot that in my opinion has traditionally been underserved."

He added: "Corporates are well served by well-known corporate brands, and many of the needs of the smaller customers can be adapted from the consumer portfolio."

BT hopes to address this with software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings, drawing on its experience with larger clients.

"Increasingly they [medium businesses] are recognising that they need to have quality of service for a business," he said. "We have provided managed services for our corporate customers for years.

"We look that the hardware requirements, the software requirements and the support requirements and all of that linked up with the connectivity, which for software-as-service is pretty fundamental. And our role is to bring it all together."

Thompson also claimed that SaaS lent itself to the BT model, as a triple-play' of connectivity, applications and support, with the whole thing paid for in one bill.

Thompson also said that he did not see Virgin as a threat as a competitor in the business market, despite its bold moves with its 200Mbps trials.

"The [Virgin] brand is very consumer orientated. The business mid-market is very fragmented, and BT is the largest provider of services to the mid-market, and we'd like to keep it that way actually."