APIs for BT's 21st Century Network (not)

For a few moments, I thought British Telecom had recognized the value of open APIs and 3rd party developers...

Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending a breakfast event at the British Consulate Boston (actually located in Cambridge Massachusetts, with beautiful views of Boston) where Paul Excell, Chief of Operations for BT's Technology Office spoke on BT's much touted 21st Century Network (21CN). He was followed by Malcolm Burwell of TTPCom, a panel discussion and questions from the floor, but most of the attention was to 21CN.

I already knew the cost justifications for 21CN and had seen slides for earlier talks. In my mind, it was all about complexity. As this view shows, BTU would go from 6+ networks and 1500 buildings to one converged (dare I say, IMS?) network and only 100 buildings.

But yesterday Paul Excell skimmed over the cost savings and instead focused on the wealth of new services that would become available on 21CN.  More than that, he suggested we would see the richness of Internet applications becoming available on 21CN.

Eventually I got to ask:  what APIs will be available?  and will BT open them up to 3rd parties the way Internet companies (Google, eBay, Amazon, Skype, ...) do?

Reasonable questions, particularly as I'd just read this recent comment by Marc Canter:  "Did you know that 45% of all of eBay’s listings come in through their APIs?"

Paul Excell's answers (paraphrased, but representative):

1. there will be rich APIs, like Parley.  (If you are not familiar with Parley, it's the ultimate API for telephony services on the Intelligent Network, i.e. it's far removed from Internet or Web 2.0 applications).
2. BT has a brand image of quality and reliability, so they need to ensure that applications work together.   (My translation:  very large 3rd parties may approach BT and negotiate for access to their APIs).

Wow!  Nice hype, but they're still clueless...