As head of SaaS at BT business, can you explain how you are helping customers to improve their bottom line and become more efficient?
We've announced deals with NetSuite, Sugar CRM, and most recently Salesforce.com. which is good timing, because what we're trying to market are the capabilities that allow customers to focus more on their own customers, serve them better and sell more.

Fundamentally, issues in business tend to go around: things like not knowing who your customers are, or not having forecasting capabilities which would help manage things better. It's a universal thing, and we hope these tools will help.

BT has traditionally been a communications company; with SaaS developing, are you now looking at the application layer?
Yes, we're trying to bring the applications and communications together. From our overall proposition set currently you can come to BT for IT services - hosting, managed services and so on - and we'll pretty much look after any element of the IT and communications infrastructure.

But we haven't really offered the top layer yet - applications. In the world of unified communications, applications and communications are coming together, but still around 60-70 per cent of IT spend is driven off companies having different departments, all running different processes and different applications. But we've published research showing that SMEs are looking to reduce suppliers and costs.

Can you explain the benefits of a SaaS model?
In the old world, you'd buy a fixed application and someone would install it on your premises. So IT does the information gathering, gets a business case together, gets sign off, then needs to code, build, test and deploy the application, and if they then find it doesn't do what they want it to, it'll go through another cycle.

In the current economic climate the last thing they want to do is take those financial risks and go through those processes. With the SaaS model you can try out an app before you buy it, so you can see if it will work or not, and the risk has therefore been mitigated.

Is there still reticence about trying the on-demand model?
You have to ask yourself do you want to be the person who strategically can help the business or are you going to put your head in the sand? The challenge from the IT community is to stand up and say that the way they've been doing it in the past is not the best and most effective way [of running applications]. There are opportunities now, though, in the current economic climate.

Are fears about security well founded?
Well, people often say they are worried about data not being on the premises, but someone told me recently that they actually had their servers nicked from their own premises, so they not only had to rebuild the IT systems but then put the data back onto them. An application from a SaaS vendor may go down for 10 minutes or half an hour but not very often, and when it comes back up everything is still there.

Isn't SaaS just for early adopters at present?
I thought it would be just the companies that are innovating, but it's not the case anymore. It's starting to get more movement and become more mainstream. Don't get me wrong, it still needs to mature as an industry, but we're starting to see mainstream uptake now.

For better or worse the economic climate means that focusing on your customers is very important. You need to make sure that as a company you're giving yourself the very best opportunities. You may worry about things like SLAs but you should probably look at the performance of what you've got already.