Komatsu Australia has selected Telstra to provide managed telecom and enterprise utility computing services under a five-year, A$35 million ($31.7 million) contract.
This is a further demonstration of Telstra’s commitment and momentum in the race to establish enterprise-grade cloud computing services in the Australian market.
There is still a lot of debate in the industry around who the leaders in the emerging enterprise cloud computing competition will be. Pure public cloud players such as Amazon and Google? Global IT services giants? Mid-sized IT vendors, hosting companies, and cloud startups? Global and domestic telcos?
In the end cloud computing is all about services that are operational today rather than preconceived notions of who could, should or might provide cloud computing in the future – cloudy is as cloudy does. Cloud computing deals are the ultimate triumph of substance over style. Like public transport infrastructure, cloud computing services need to be built out and operational before CIOs will set out on a cloud journey. The core proposition is that the cloud service is already running at scale, reliably, and in preferred locations – all a CIO needs to do is to decide to start consuming the service.
Telstra has been quietly building its cloud computing capabilities for the joint goal of both transforming the company’s internal approach to IT and creating a new service offering for enterprise customers. The Komatsu deal is the second major cloud computing deal won by Telstra in the past year, following on from a A$50 million deal struck with Visy Industries. Komatsu is extending an existing three-year managed network relationship with Telstra to include a wider scope of telecoms services and will also roll all its IT services into Telstra’s existing infrastructure-as-a-service environment by the end of June.