Michael Boustridge, the new president of BT’s Americas operation, stopped by YG HQ recently along with head of sales Colin Spence. I asked them what they think the network (writ large) needs to learn how to do better this year.

Plenty, they seemed to agree. “I’m shocked by how many providers want to just throw bandwidth at the network — effectively ensuring that it becomes the very commodity that we all don’t want it to be,” said Boustridge. “We see the need for network investments that insure that enterprise applications can operate to the standards our clients have for them. BT delivers extremely low-latency service to financial services clients so they can do very fast trading. That’s not something you do with bandwidth, but with network intelligence. The network should also be able to manage mobility globally. It should know how and where to do roaming to deliver the best and most economical experience.”

One favorite soap-box of mine is presence-based services in the network. Spence chimed in here: “The industry needs to come together better on how we should support that. We’re waiting now on Cisco and Microsoft to agree on this in a standard, industry-wide way.”

Uh-oh. If one of the world’s largest and most sophisticated network providers is waiting on those two firms, the rest of us are really stuck…