Optus Business reaps almost $700 million in deals

Optus' services division won almost $700 million in ICT deals in the last year, the carrier revealed yesterday.

Optus Business grew 10.8 percent year-on-year in its first year following the integration of the division with Alphawest and NCS.

Most of the deals won in the last 12 months are five or six year agreements, said Optus Business managing director John Paitaridis.

"They are all beyond just the telco piece," he said. "We've started to move into contact centre, unified communications…in many cases customers are asking us to manage their networks for them."

The carrier revealed this week that its managed services unit has over 350 ICT projects, with more than 1,000 staff managing 90,000 customer endpoints.

This week it announced the hiring of former HP South Pacific managing director David Caspari as its new vice president of product and ICT. Former Alphawest CEO Ian Smith is also now vice president of the managed services and delivery unit.

The carrier also announced an "incredibly important" push into security services with a new "centre of excellence" and now has a customer facility called Thinkspace, aimed at attracting "top flight management".

In the last 12 months, Optus Business has won "integrated ICT" contracts with UGL, Westpac, Virgin Australia, the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, as well as renewing a $530 million contract with ANZ.

In March, it also announced plans to become the first telco in Australia to rollout Cisco's contact centre as-a-service technology.

Last year Optus also partnered with NextDC to offer cloud services. The telco has no plans in the near term to build another data centre in Australia, Paitaridis said this week.

Focus areas for Optus Business are unified communications and collaboration as-a-service, contact centre as-a-service, contact centre in the cloud, cybersecurity applications and business applications.

Paitaridis said the telco no longer views its carriage and ICT portfolios separately.

"The mix and DNA of our skill set is more genuinely ICT than what may appear in terms of the broader Optus brand," he said.