Jamcracker cloud platform to keep powering Telstra's T-Suite

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 26 October 2011 11:46

Telstra has renewed its contract with Jamcracker - the provider of the cloud services enablement platform underpinning its T-Suite offering of a range of applications as a service, target at SMEs - for a further two years.

Telstra announced plans for T-Suite in June 2008, billing it as a one-stop shop where established software names would share virtual 'shelf space' with up-and-coming Australian companies. The service was soft launched in November 2008 with an initial range of offerings from McAfee, Microsoft, MessageLabs and Iron Mountain. The full service launched in April 2009 with these and other applications. More have been added since.

The Jamcracker platform "enables different types of cloud service offerings to be delivered with a single point of provisioning, access, security, billing, administration and support."

Steve Crawford, Jamcracker's vice president of marketing and business development, told ExchangeDaily: "There is a new term that has come out in the last couple of years called the cloud services brokerage model coined by Gartner chief analyst Daryl Plummer.

"There is exponential growth in the supply of cloud services; startup cost is very low and demand is growing exponentially as well, both in SMEs and enterprise. But if a business has a number of employees using different cloud services you pretty soon start running into some pretty serious management issues: multiple, billings, password management, where data is going. They want one throat to choke. That is where the cloud services brokerage comes in. Services like T-Suite provides single billing and singe access.

While the end customer has only one relationship, with Telstra, in some cases Telstra's commercial relationship is with the application owner and in some cases with Jamcracker. Later in 2009 Telstra announced a relationship with Microsoft under which it added Exchange Online, Office Communications Online, SharePoint Online and Office Live Meeting to T-Suite. Although Telstra's commercial relationship is with Microsoft and these services are hosted by Microsoft, they accessed through the Jamcracker platform.

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