Telstra's cloud certified to run SAP apps

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 29 September 2011 14:00

Telstra has taken another step in its $800m five year journey to try and become a top cloud services provider, saying it has become the first cloud services provider in Australia to have its cloud services platform certified to support and deliver SAP applications.

Mark Pratley, general manager, Telstra Cloud Computing, said: "SAP is one of the largest enterprise application providers and is used by the majority of our customers'¦Having our infrastructure accredited by SAP means organisations who want to run their SAP applications out of Telstra's cloud can do so with the confidence of knowing it will operate at its optimum on our cloud platform."

While Telstra might not be the only cloud services provider in Australia hosting SAP applications for its customers, Pratley distanced Telstra's offering from what he said were more 'bespoke' certifications.

He told iTWire: "We are not the first people to be SAP certified but the first under a service provider model where the platform is pre-certified to SAP standards. You can certify a particular instance [of SAP] for each customer - a bespoke platform that you certify and put into a delivery model is typical. What is not typical, and needs a lot of upfront investment of money and time, is to pre-certify a whole platform, a whole operational team and a whole support team."

He added: "We think there is a huge advantage in doing this because there is much less effort involved in pre-migration than there would otherwise be'¦We get efficiencies and a way to differentiate our offering'¦And some early customers agree."

He said that, from a customer point of view, certification was important: "The general practice in the industry particular in enterprise and government is that certification matters a great deal."

He described the process of obtaining certification as "a very detailed piece of work: it covers the facilities, the operation model, the platform itself, the systems and tools we use to run it and a commitment to be regularly audited."

At present Telstra is simply offering to host customer's SAP applications but Pratley said that, down the track it could become a channel to market along with its cloud computing partner, Accenture. "That is the future'¦It is a natural evolution," he told iTWire.

Telstra Enterprise and Government announced in October 2010 a partnership under which Accenture would provide the expertise to transition clients' existing applications into Telstra's cloud and to provide ongoing support for those applications, and to implement new applications in the Telstra cloud.

Telstra followed this, in June 2011, with the announcement that it planned to invest $880m in cloud computing over the next five years with the goal of becoming "The biggest network integrated cloud provider in the country."