Telstra, SAP, Accenture team up for cloud

Australia's largest telecommunications company Telstra has teamed up with enterprise application company SAP and global service organisation Accenture, on new hosted offerings for enterprise and government.

In October 2010, Telstra and Accenture signed a three-year agreement that would see the two companies working together to deliver cloud solutions for large Australian organisations. SAP certified Telstra's cloud infrastructure last year, so that companies that wanted to run their SAP applications out of Telstra's cloud could do so. Now, Telstra has announced that the three giants have developed a new suite of cloud offerings for enterprise and government customers.

"We believe that our customers want choice; and we believe the relationship between Accenture, SAP and Telstra will ensure they have the choice to have all, or part of their application infrastructure in the cloud," SAP's head of business solutions and cloud for Australia Jeremy Goddard told ZDNet Australia.

Telstra customers will be offered a range of SAP applications that will be hosted in Telstra's locally-based cloud infrastructure. Accenture will manage system integration, migration, SAP application maintenance and help desk services.

Goddard said that the products on offer will allow companies to shift new projects into operating expenditure, rather than capital expenditure, because there won't need to be up-front investment in infrastructure, if it is hosted in the cloud. This would help to get a lot of projects off the ground that have been struggling in a capital-restrained environment.

"It will enable the industry to drive productivity across their business," he said. "We are seeing enormous momentum as an industry in the cloud. This announcement will enable our customers to move to the cloud in a controlled and managed way, in a secure, proven environment that Telstra would offer."

The partnership will come as part of Telstra's $800 million investment in cloud computing services, announced last year. Goddard said that the companies had worked to getting things prepared and were now ready to start taking orders.

Telstra's general manager of cloud services Mark Pratley said that Telstra had always intended to offer a combination of licensing, infrastructure and service design for cloud. Also, the alliance will now allow Telstra to offer a hybrid cloud solution, or a total cloud offer, with all SAP applications hosted in Telstra's cloud, in combination with the traditional Accenture infrastructure model.

"It's in a form factor that is now order-able; rather than a roadmap, it is now the rubber hitting the road," he said.

Goddard said that a lot of businesses were now going straight to the cloud, rather than going for an on-premises solution.

"CIOs are looking at on-premise versus cloud, for any new project, and government departments are starting to look at the cloud a lot more seriously," he said. "We see this offer as having a wide-ranging impact on what organisations will be able to do."