Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Well, unlike Salesforce, Google or IBM, which are in the business of commercialising software (be it single- or multi-tenanted), Telstra is not a software company.
Like Google, however, Telstra is in the business of benefiting from virtually any growth in the number of Internet users on its platform.
Both companies have built sophisticated engines to turn bits travelling around the Internet into money: Google via advertising; Telstra via network usage charges.
T-Suite may benefit Telstra if its SMB customers are stimulated to upgrade their broadband contracts, but this will only happen if Telstra can attract a critical mass of developers to host their applications on the T-Suite platform.
Telstra needs to be wary of being dragged into a highly competitive SaaS delivery model that is not its core competence, and should instead focus on providing a compelling PaaS offering to software developers – but this is also a highly competitive space.
Telstra's challenge, and opportunity, will be to construct an offering that leverages both its local marketing muscle and the increased capacity of its new Next G and Next IP networks.
T-Suite will need to come up with some innovative ways to 'hoist itself up with its own bootlaces' to get application developers on board and offer up an attractive set of applications to its customers.
Steve Hodgkinson is the director of Ovum's government practice in Australia and New Zealand.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
How to Make Business Discovery Work for Your Business
Business Discovery takes its cues from consumer apps. Like Google, it encourages us- ers to hunt for and explore data without worrying about or even noticing the underly- ing technology. Their entire experience is working within an intuitive interface to get real-time, self-service results with only minimal training. ...more
Try an easy-to-use set of web-enabled
tools for business-class productivity services. Office 365 provides
anywhere-access to email, important documents, contacts, and calendars
on almost any device.
Latest Headlines from IT INDUSTRY
