Frost & Sullivan Award 2005

BT wins Frost & Sullivan European Market Leadership Award 2005 for Audio Conferencing

BT Conferencing has won the prestigious Frost & Sullivan Conferencing Award for Market Leadership in the European audio conferencing market.

This major industry award is for boosting revenue and growing market share, as well as developing market leading technology. The award recognises outstanding industry achievement, diligence and innovation.

Nigel Stagg, chief executive, BT Conferencing, said: "This award reflects our continued leadership of the European conferencing market.

"I am particularly pleased that the award not only recognises our long-standing strengths in delivering outstanding value and service to our customers, but also reflects our momentum in terms of innovation in solutions, partnerships and customer experience.

"These are the attributes which are going to be so fundamentally important to drive sustained growth in our reputation and scale."

Jennifer Fruehauf, of Frost & Sullivan, said: "BT is world renowned in the telecom industry and holds an extensive patent portfolio. Subsequently, the industry alliances struck by BT Conferencing are often pioneering.

"The company's superior strategies have underlined its exceptional all-round performance and have helped position it as a market share leader."

Frost & Sullivan track revenue and market share through a series of interviews and from secondary data gathered from their own database. This information is then compared and companies are ranked by position.

BT Conferencing can help organisations make significant savings in time and money, reducing the need to travel and complementing communication tools already in use. A BT internal research project estimated that during the past year, BT Group itself eliminated the need for nearly 300,000 face-to-face meetings through conferencing, making savings of £26million per annum.

BT Conferencing serves 71 of the UK's FTSE 100 companies. BT has served the European and global audio conferencing market for more than 20 years, and the web conferencing market for more than seven years. It has the highest market share within the region, and the UK remains the largest market in Western Europe, with strong demand for conferencing services.

BT Conferencing offers two of the leading services: BT MeetMe, its reservation-less audio conferencing product, and Microsoft Live Meeting online conferencing which incorporates document and application sharing over the internet.

In 2002, BT began working strategically with Microsoft and Cisco on VoIP services development, and in the desk-based audio conference market.

BT's association with Microsoft saw a formal alliance in 2004 with BT Conferencing, which resulted in plans to fully integrate Live Meeting and Microsoft's other communication products into BT Conferencing's audio services.

BT's MeetMe audio conferencing service combined with Microsoft's Live Meeting was recently launched as Live Meeting 2005. It offers customers an easy first step to convergence, bringing together network infrastructure, mobility and communications and collaboration tools.

Live Meeting 2005 offers hosted, integrated audio and web conferencing services along with desktop scheduling and control. This means customers can start to experience the benefits of convergence with no infrastructure cost.

About Frost & Sullivan

Frost & Sullivan, a global growth consulting company, has been partnering with clients to support the development of innovative strategies for more than 40 years. The company's industry expertise integrates growth consulting, growth partnership services, and corporate management training to identify and develop opportunities. Frost & Sullivan serves an extensive clientele that includes Global 1000 companies, emerging companies, and the investment community by providing comprehensive industry coverage that reflects a unique global perspective and combines ongoing analysis of markets, technologies, econometrics, and demographics. For more information, visit www.frost.com