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What would you call a cross between BT and HP? Concert Union?

Nobody is even slightly predicting a merger between the two giant corporations, but the mobile and fixed telco worlds may have to deal with a sort of hybrid soon. An alliance between the two has been operating for the last 18 months, but is now being accelerated "and we're looking for a good brand," said an HP executive at a seminar in Venice today.

The alliance first got mentioned as a device for doing a project for Hertz car rental, <1/>18 months or so ago.

There's no simple way to summarise what it involves, and according to HP's Luigi Mantegazza, the full implications are still undecided; but a nice simplification would be that it is the European equivalent of a similar alliance between AT&T and IBM.

"It's the same deal as the one that won the Hertz deal," said Mantegazza, who is General Manager Consulting & Integration HP Services Europe, Middle East and Africa. "But we're taking it to the next level."

The "C" word - Convergence - is what it's all about. The days when a big computer company could sell to telcos without extra expertise are long over; not even Cisco can manage it. But nobody in the telco business these days has the sort of data management skills needed to scale up to modern customer management.

The problem is all scaling, delegates at HP's IMS forum in Venice agreed today.

The conventional voice-call business didn't require much information about customers except their billing address, and the number of minutes spent talking. Today's telcos, mobile and fixed line, have to do something rather like normal corporate IT customer management - but with tens, or even hundreds, of millions of customers, instead of a few thousand.

"Alliances like this are questionable," commented Bernt Ostergaard of Current Analysis. "The IBM-AT&T association hasn't been a total success, and is in doubt for the future. This is, basically, the same alliance, but with a European headquarters instead of an American one."

  Tags: Guy Kewney, convergence, BT, HP