California’s Silicon Valley is not the sort of place you’d expect a senior executive of a European telecoms incumbent to be based. But Ted Griggs is not the normal sort of person who gets to be appointed the CTO of a telecoms operator.

The appointment of Griggs to be CTO of BT Voice could be a significant move for the UK-based operator — a sign that it is a serious believer in the idea that infrastructure and services are ultimately different and that BT wants to be a bit different from the run-of-the-mill incumbents.

Griggs is founder and CEO of Ribbit, which calls itself “Silicon Valley’s first phone company” and is seen by some as a competitor to Google Voice, the search company’s venture — so far limited to the US — to provide people with a cloud-based phone service which will route calls to any number of separate phone connections, fixed and mobile.

He has founded at least five companies: he sold a company called Junction to Cisco and then Internet Gaming Zone to Microsoft.

He set up softswitch maker Syndeo in1999 and ran it until 2003. He helped to found Ribbit in 2006 and BT bought it for $105 million in 2008. According to BT, “Ribbit has now been fully integrated into BT and therefore it makes sense for Ribbit and voice to come together under Ted’s leadership.”

So what is Ribbit and what can it do for BT? “The premise of Ribbit was to build a phone company in the way that Silicon Valley companies like to work,” Griggs tells Global Telecoms Business.

He compares Google Maps, which is designed so that programmers and developers can bundle into an application they create, interfacing the mapping information with other services.

“Traditionally phone companies don’t behave like internet companies,” says Griggs. They offer a range of services, including voicemail, SMS messages and directory information, “but they don’t like to give others access to those services”.

For the typical phone company customer, the only interfaces with voicemail “are a blinking light on the phone and touchtone access to the messages”.

But think of voicemail in a different way, he says: “Someone has left you content, which you might want to use. Let everything be driven by programmers.”

So this way of thinking led him and his colleagues in Ribbit to think: “What would happen if you open up a phone company?” If you were to think of calling and messaging as content and think about the value that they created. “This applies to both the business market and the consumer market,” says Griggs.

Take Salesforce.com, the cloud-based provider of customer relationship management services at around $100 per seat per month, he says. “What can we do with that?” he asks.

Ribbit has built an interface into Salesforce, priced at around $35 a month for “a significant value add”. Salesforce is designed for sales people, whose main tool is the phone — yet until now there has been no way to link their phone calls with the Salesforce database, except by persuading sales people to type in their notes after each call.

But Ribbit has voice-to-text software, so a sales person can read a note into the phone, and that can be stored as text in Salesforce. “Instead of typing in your comments, you can dictate a memo from your mobile phone as you drive back from a meeting,” says Griggs. “It’s completely frictionless. People are not spending their downtime keeping their records up to date.”

Ribbit was working on this project from 2006, backed by venture capital from Alsop-Louie Partners, Allegis Capital, Peninsula Equity Partners and KPG Ventures. It made its first announcement in December 2007 announcing “a new platform for developing telephony services and a new business model for serving the new global telephony market”.

Says Griggs: “BT had a group doing a similar concept with web APIs.” BT’s managing director of service design, JP Rangaswami, saw Ribbit and recognised the similarly in thinking.

It’s all done in software, says Griggs. “It’s not a matter of connecting boxes together.” He compares Ribbit’s approach to the traditional phone company approach with Google Docs versus Microsoft Word. “Collaboration in the cloud is more important than an obscure feature in Word.”

So now that Ribbit is owned by BT and Griggs is CTO of BT Voice — and Rangaswami is managing director of BT Voice and chairs Ribbit — what does this mean for BT’s strategy? “It’s a transformation from a network operator to a software and service provider,” says Griggs.

“BT has a lot of powerful things to offer, such as the worldwide reach of its network,” he adds. Meanwhile the penetration of its landline services is — like all traditional fixed operators’ — declining. “We need to leverage the assets now, while you still have a healthy network.”

He warns that many companies in this position would spend more time protecting its existing business than in innovating — until it’s too late. He’s determined that BT should not make this mistake.

“BT has infrastructure, and Ribbit has platforms with services.” And Ribbit’s team — with experience from Syndeo — understands the equipment side of the business. “We can connect calls to fixed and mobile networks, to MSN, Google Talk, Skype and other services,” he says.

That knowledge of phone requirements is important, he adds. “In the UK if I have anything that looks like a phone, it has to be able to dial emergency services, and we have to reserve capacity so that can be done. If you can’t do that, you’re not going to get beyond being a toy.”

He didn’t say it, but most voice over broadband providers specifically warn that emergency services — 112 in Europe, 911 in North America — are not normally available. They should be, he means.

But beyond the national rules, “what if BT applies its services across its worldwide backbone?” he asks. “It has the underpinnings of a global telco, independent of geography.”

As CEO of Ribbit, Griggs has suddenly bounded into a remarkable role in an incumbent operator. From his headquarters in Mountain View, California — Google is based in the same city — he is CTO of all BT’s voice operations, right down to the phone in the average British living room. “All of that business reports into me,” he says. “It’s very daunting.”

Why? “BT sees a substantial gain in moving to a software model — for example, savings in capex and opex. We’re no longer looking at five, 10 or 20 different boxes from different vendors. Of course, it doesn’t happen overnight.”

The challenge is to “get BT into new markets and make new money” as well as to find ways of moving the TDM legacy network forward.

“We’re looking at other applications to build a worldwide global network.” There is, he says, “ a lot of opportunity to leverage connectivity”, but “not like carriers would go about it”.

The first consumer application that BT will be offering is called Ribbit Mobile — itself an intriguing move for a company without its own consumer mobile offering.

“It’s a consumer over-the-top application,” says Griggs. It will consolidate numbers, and allow users — not just BT customers — to make calls cheaply. But it will also pull content from social networks and other sources about who’s calling. “It’s there and we’re making it more useful.”

Or it will be possible to embed the service into Microsoft Outlook — so calls can be made from the contact list — or into HR applications, or Facebook.

Meanwhile it’s also offering services to enterprise. Oracle saw the link into Salesforce and there is now Ribbit for Oracle, he says.

Independent software developers are linking into other applications: “A developer can create a new revenue stream, leveraging the phone company to be its channel.”

So where is it going? Griggs is candid: “When you do this you don’t know what can happen. It’s the tip of the iceberg.”

BT’s Ribbit will earn revenue by providing the APIs so that links can be made into other applications. It will also sell consumer services, he suggested: “$30 for a fully functioning landline phone replacement”, he said.

And Ribbit will be offering the service to non-BT operators, via a service called “bring your own network”. Which operators? Too early to give names, says Griggs, who says there are “four to five in the pipeline over the next nine to 12 months”.

That would enable other operators — and Griggs implies there are some significant names among them — to offer Ribbit services. “Carriers realise they have to get involved,” he says.

For that and other reasons, Ribbit will keep its own brand and management, and will stay as a US-based company, says Griggs, and that’s where it can continue to attract “top-notch software talent”.

But “BT will be our biggest channel and customer.” And BT’s senior executives — people such as Rangaswami and Al-Noor Ramji, the CEO of BT Design — “are very much aligned with what we want to do”, he says. They share Ribbit’s ideas about the move “from a network view to a software view”.

It’s all very different from the traditional idea of a telco. What it means for the long-term future of BT is still too early to say. GTB