Telstra to provide 'complete communications solutions' to small businesses - again

Stuart Corner
Friday, 01 October 2010 15:09

Opinion and Analysis

Telstra is about to embark on a major promotion to provide integrated and tailored communications, collaboration and cloud services to small businesses. It's an admirable and much needed initiative, but Telstra has tried this sort of thing before, and has little to show for it.

Earlier this week Telstra was trotting out, for at least the third time since it ceased to enjoy monopoly status, its mantra that is if finally transforming itself from an engineering organisation into a sales and marketing led, customer-focussed organisation; and claiming that this time it really means it and it will really achieve its goals.

Now, jaded long-time Telstra watchers have been treated to another déjà vu moment: Telstra's latest plan to provide complete communications solutions to small businesses. Telstra has invested considerably to replicate, in its George Street, Sydney 'Experience Centre', a bicycle shop to demonstrate what this new scheme all about. We're yet to see advertising and promotional blitz for this offering, but you can expect it to be significant.

In essence, what Telstra is doing is combining its Next G and ADSL access networks with IP centrex functionality and the cloud-based collaboration tools available through T-Suite (but not branded as such) to provide an integrated system for a small business and which will be configured and customised to that business' requirements. In the demo, the proprietor is in the shop, his wife works on the business from home and his bike mechanic is either in the store or out on the road. Calls can be answered anywhere, calendars can be synchronised and shared: all the standard unified comms and collaboration stuff that is becoming the norm in larger enterprises

Now this is all good, very good. I've been saying for a long time that even the smallest business has access to and could benefit from the kind of integrated communications and collaboration products and services that a few years ago were available only to large businesses. What makes it hard for them is that they have neither the knowledge nor the resources to acquire and configure all these, and there is a shortage of service organisations really addressing this market.

Telstra certainly has all the ingredients: the products and services, the expertise, the brand awareness and the channels to market to make this really successful. Will it succeed? Perhaps. This is at least the third time in the past decade that Telstra has launched an initiative to provide complete communications solutions to small businesses. Thanks to the technology advances in that time it has a far better story to tell today.

But the problem is that none of the earlier initiatives appears to have achieved anything: with each new scheme Telstra makes no claim to build on the achievements of its predecessors, or to have learnt any lessons from them.

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