Optus seeks greater role in enterprise cloud management

Optus is seeking to manage every step of the transition for companies and government agencies moving from on-premises hosting to a hybrid or public cloud model.

Australia's second-largest telecommunications company announced on Wednesday that its latest cloud strategy will offer a much more advisory role for companies and agencies looking to move to the cloud.

"It's a combination of what we have built, partnered and acquired to drive our cloud capability more end-to-end, in response to customer demands," Optus Business MD John Paitaridis told ZDNet.

"We're offering migration advisory and management skills. In term of the on-premises and legacy environments and how they move it into the cloud. We've bolstered our skill set, and we've increased our resources."

Optus highlighted the company's recent acquisition of Microsoft partner Ensyst to offer access to Azure, and the company's acceptance into the Cisco Intercloud Provider network to make it easier for companies to manage workloads across multiple clouds, both private, and public.

"[Ensyst] have the incredible capability of taking Microsoft workloads and docking them onto the public cloud," Paitaridis said.

"We have announced an end-to-end capability in terms of our cloud infrastructure environments. We can essentially take customers from on-premises environments, private cloud, and now snap in public cloud offers as well as they arise."

Customers can extend workloads into Azure, and Amazon Web Service with Optus' cloud offering, but Paitaridis said much of the strategy was focused around getting companies and government agencies to take that first step into the cloud.

"It does involve a lot of mapping of their current environment, looking at their current systems, what they have on premises, what applications are cloud ready. We might help the customer virtualise first, and then help them move to the public, private or hybrid cloud environment," he said.

Optus is focusing in particular on state and federal governments, and was one of the first named on the Commonwealth government's cloud services panel. Paitaridis said Optus would have conversations with new and existing customers, such as the Australian Taxation Office about moving to the cloud.

"We've got long-standing ICT managed services contracts in the federal government... clearly we're working closely with the tax office around their strategy," he said.

"But increasingly there are agencies that aren't doing as much as the tax office is with us who are interested and engaged with us."