Telstra's cloud gathers over consumers

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 29 September 2010 16:59

IT Industry - Strategy

Telstra has identifed network applications and services - including the provision of cloud computing and SaaS to the consumer market - along with media and Asia as new business areas that it hopes will account for at least 20 percent of revenue by 2013.

Elaborating on these at Telstra's investor briefing, CEO, David Thodey said that Telstra envisaged providing network applications and services (NAS) to all customer segments: enterprise, SMB and consumer, although the offerings would be different.

However he stressed that "Telstra is not an IT services company. We are not in the IT services resale business. We are a network related applications and services business."

NAS, Thodey said: "is the key area within the ICT bucket where we can add value and differentiate ourselves and we have already taken action to put a structure in place. We have been at this for two or three years now and it is starting to pay dividends.

Thodey put up a slide indicating that Telstra would offer managed networks and unified communications services to both the enterprise and SMB markets and network computing (cloud services), integrated services management and business applications and SaaS to the enterprise, SMB and consumer markets.

"This is an exciting area. We now have about $750m of revenue form this area and we think there is a potential to easily double that," he said

Thodey said: "Nerida [Caesar head of Telstra Enterprise & Government] and Michael Rocca [COO] have bandied together to drive this to another level and it now applies to the SMB and consumers'¦But it is different for different markets.

Thodey said that Rocca was now responsible for this business overall and it as now run on a strict P&L basis. "It is easy to give too much away, so we made that change about two months ago."

"At the high end it is about complex network outsourcing, unified communications, systems integration, cloud computing and applications in the cloud.

"[For SMBs] if I look at what Dina [Shiff, head of Telstra Business] is doing, with the T-Suite product, which is truly world class, it is about applications in the cloud and hosting and Dina is driving a set of applications and services offerings appropriate to SMBs'¦driving productivity for SMBs in Australia.

"For the consumer there is a public cloud. BigPond offers email services and the potential for that business is enormous if you look at applications in the cloud that we can provide."