Telstra's cloud aims for the stratosphere

With some early wins and lessons under its belt, the picture for Telstra's cloud computing offerings is starting to firm up.

According to Telstra's general manager of cloud services, Mark Pratley, Telstra is seeing enough traction in both of its two major cloud computing product areas — its partnership with Accenture and its T-suite platform — to make the offerings long-term propositions.

"What we were testing in those early days," says Pratley of T-Suite, "was just how relevant a carrier could be in this space — how software would be delivered, from and to. What we've learnt is that there is certainly a place in the domestic market for that model — the businesses that are interested are showing early signs that indicate a carrier branding and positioning makes sense."

Pratley says that T-Suite for Telstra is evolving rapidly from a novelty in its business to a point where it's a capacity SIO (service in operation)-type growth discussion. And T-Suite is growing fast, with the executive citing 100 per cent levels of growth quarterly.

It's a similar case with what might broadly be termed Telstra's infrastructure-as-a-service offering that it launched with Accenture last year. Pratley says that the company is seeing "very big adoption" from existing customers, like equipment manufacturer Kohmatsu, and particularly from companies that already have relationships with Telstra for telecommunications service.

According to the executive, there's now strong evidence and market data that the cloud computing infrastructure space will mean a significant change for where most large organisations manage their own technology infrastructure. For Telstra, that's a reason for the telco to look at a three- to four-year underlying model of investment in its cloud computing infrastructure to provision for future customer growth.

"It's very encouraging for us," says Pratley about Telstra's current cloud product suite. "If those signs weren't there, and it was a struggle to convince people to buy, then we'd be less enthusiastic about the cloud generally."

Lessons

According to Pratley, the most popular T-Suite offerings being taken up are in the collaboration space: hosted email and collaboration products, for example. Next after that are backup and security offerings and last, the accounting and HR packages that come as part of T-Suite, which Pratley says have been taken up in smaller numbers and have a longer sales cycle.

The executive explains that a number of SME customers are trialling T-Suite product lines, which they understand can be delivered as a service, before gradually adding other products as the organisations gain in understanding and maturity.

On the infrastructure-as-a-service side, Pratley is seeing a certain degree of standardisation between customers as they look to shift some of their core computing resources off the books.

Companies' internal IT environments may have evolved in a certain way, becoming attached to certain suppliers of technologies, he says, but when those companies look at outsourcing infrastructure into a cloud, "they can reassess with a little bit more of a clear vision".

"I actually see it as a migration to a standard by default," he says.

"I think the reason is that most companies at an IT level acknowledge that the variation that they are seeking doesn't provide any particular advantage," he says. Having said that, Pratley notes, customers obviously don't want to be forced to use a particular application or service.

It's all about flexibility

Pratley says that cloud is delivering on its promise of flexibility.

The executive cites the example of one customer who was able to change a deployment of hundreds of virtualised testing and development systems as their workload altered. In another case, Telstra's platform enabled a customer to build a disaster recovery facility which it otherwise would have found difficult.

In both cases, Pratley emphasised that the functional design of what a customer deployed could be changed on the fly, which would have required purchasing or getting rid of substantial chunks of hardware if the customers wanted to do it themselves.

"There's been far greater use by in-contract customers of flexibility than I would have thought," he said. In general, IAAS customers were firstly trying the infrastructure out, he said, realising they had options that they didn't have before, and then deploying more products on Telstra's infrastructure.

However, despite the burgeoning levels of competition in the cloud computing infrastructure space, with companies like Optus, HP, IBM, Fujitsu, CSC and others all launching solutions over the past several years, Telstra wasn't yet seeing formal tendering processes for cloud computing processes, but instead just requests for information.

"I haven't seen one yet anyway," he says. "I don't think that the industry is confident enough to tender for a cloud, because they don't really know what it is. People, I think, are still putting together the pieces of what it should be. I don't think the language is locked down enough."

Government and the future

One group of customers that has proven particularly tough for cloud computing service providers to crack over the past several years is the public sector — which is particularly sensitive to the need for onshore hosting. Both Victoria's Privacy Commissioner and the Federal Defence Signals Directorate have recently warned of the dangers of cloud computing, while acknowledging that Australian government organisations were increasingly interested in shifting to the new generation of platforms.

Telstra recently made a big splash in the Federal Government arena, offering departments and agencies a free trial of cloud computing services and a chance to be comprehensively briefed in the area.

Pratley says that the public sector is on the same journey, but perhaps still playing catch-up to some organisations in the commercial side of the world. The trial was taken up by a number of Canberra organisations, and the executive says he's equally enthusiastic that Telstra's model will work for the public sector as it appears to be for the private — but that, contrary to only a short time ago, government decision-makers and Telstra are now "talking in the same language".

"To break through all of those 'if, then, maybes, risks and issues' takes time," he says. "We're well on the way to doing that."

Overall, if you compare Telstra's cloud journey today to where it was only last year, the telco appears to have come a long way — and Pratley is confident about the future. He notes Telstra's cloud vision isn't for everyone, but believes that the company now has "a strong proposition which will work well for a number of years". And, most importantly, the overall market is changing.

"The inertia is not there anymore," he says. It's time to look ahead to the future.