Ovum attended the recent Telstra Analyst Summit in Melbourne and was updated on the progress of its managed network services for enterprises.
Although it is slightly behind plan on its product roadmap for Application Assured Networking (AAN), its new integrated service management approach can provide the glue between its network application and services portfolio, its customer legacy systems, and third-party elements.
This will ultimately help it to achieve its goal of providing customers with a single point of accountability for multiple products and multiple providers, and address its key strategic priority to improve customer service.
New services offerings to support network-centric applications
Telstra continues to deliver on its objective of becoming a network-centric application and service provider and has released solutions to help with its end-to-end managed services proposition for enterprises.
The latest components of its AAN include an online portal that reports the network-based application-level performance and utilization, and allows companies to optimize their applications based on the information provided. The next product in the roadmap is the policy management component, which will allow users to schedule and dynamically allocate bandwidth and enable quality of service. This was originally planned for mid-2012 but is slightly behind plan.
It is in services that we see the most important element for customers. The new integrated service management proposition will help tie together all Telstra’s network and application services portfolio with customer legacy systems, and third-party elements in a single management layer. Telstra claims to currently have 22.000 devices under management (e.g. routers, switches), which is a small but significant start.
The proposition includes integrated service desk and integrated operations, where in a much more proactive approach Telstra will manage third-party networks when required. Professional services are also included, covering areas such as cloud, contact centers, security, unified communications, IP networks, NBN consulting, and IPV6. Telstra claims its consulting services revenues grew 85% over the last year. Although this was starting from a small base, we expect growth to continue as customers struggle to deal with increasingly complex and interconnected ICT environments.