Telstra joins PaaS gold rush with T-Suite

Steve Hodgkinson
Friday, 20 June 2008 09:05

IT Industry - Strategy

Telstra has announced that it will launch a platform, called T-Suite, for delivery of software as a service offerings aimed at small to medium-sized businesses.




T-Suite is a further move by Telstra to strengthen its relationships with small to medium-sized business (SMB) customers and to stimulate growth in traffic volumes on its Next G mobile and Next IP broadband networks.

The move has been wrongly reported in the local media as 'Telstra getting into the software business' in competition with the likes of salesforce.com – which it is not.

T-Suite will simply be a Telstra-branded retail space and platform for the same software as a service (SaaS) offerings that are available from the Internet via any browser.

It is interesting to compare this news with a few other existing and emerging offerings in the rush towards 'as service' and 'cloud computing' gold by giant corporations also targeting the SMB market.

There are many, but let's just reflect on three to illustrate the differences in market positioning.

The first is the now venerable salesforce.com – the first major success story in the conversion of software from the desktop (i.e. paid for up front and installed on your computer) to the webtop (i.e. paid on a usage basis and accessed from the Internet via a browser).

Salesforce was also an early pioneer in platform as a service (PaaS) offerings with force.com, a hosting platform for applications 'in the cloud' (i.e. on a Salesforce server in an unknown location accessed via the Internet).

Salesforce also launched the AppExchange and developer.force.com sandpits and tools for software developers.

The second is Google's App Engine PaaS offering. Google provides an initially free platform to developers, a mix of development tools and hosting.

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