Telstra made waves when it launched Telstra T-Suite all the way back in 2008, so long ago that the original batch of apps included Message Labs and McAfee, companies since acquired. The Microsoft products were hosted applications; Office 365 wouldn’t launch for another three years.
It's fair to say the news wasn’t greeted enthusiastically by the channel, who saw it as a way to cut out the middleman.
Fast forward seven years and T-Suite is being put out to pasture and will be replaced by the more pragmatically named Telstra Apps Marketplace. Did T-Suite fail?
On the contrary, according to Telstra. The original platform was a victim of its own success. It has established “a lot” of paying users already but it wasn’t flexible enough to cope with the rapid expansion and deployment of SaaS programs.
For example, Telstra can add a new SaaS program much faster to the Apps Marketplace than T-Suite. The company plans to rapidly onboard handpicked apps that administrators can assign to individual employees within a business.
Onboarding is faster due to the white-label platform behind the Apps Marketplace, AppDirect. It handles billing and distribution and serves as a connection point for local and global ISVs through its API program. Telstra can hand out specs for the AppDirect APIs to anyone that wants to onboard onto the Apps Marketplace. This frees up Telstra from the time-consuming work of doing the integration in-house.
Apps could arrive faster than Telstra’s own timetable as AppDirect’s telco customers onboard apps in other countries. AppDirect has a growing list of apps that Telstra can turn on instantly for its Australian market.
[To learn more about Telstra's IaaS strategy, read this article]
Another new trick – and one that T-Suite could never perform – is the ability to add private marketplaces, which come in at least two guises.
Telstra intends to set up private marketplaces by industry, with education and government first off the rank. These private marketplaces will only present approved or recommended apps for organisations in that vertical. This will cut down the amount of time it takes an admin to compare, select and deploy apps.
The second use of private marketplaces is even more interesting. Telstra will let companies set up personalised marketplaces from which employees can choose to deploy their own apps. The marketplace might include a mix of public apps, services such as mobile device management and non-SaaS applications such as custom line-of-business apps hosted on Telstra’s IaaS platform.
An admin can control how users access the apps, report on their usage and billing, enforce security measures, chargeback apps to divisions or subsidiaries and test applications.
“I think this is applicable to organisations of 25 to thousands of employees,” says Joel Dane, a cloud solutions specialist who was recently promoted from head of sales to general manager of cloud services. (The telco has brought its separate cloud divisions – IaaS, SaaS and professional services – into one group.)
Telstra is only now testing features such as private marketplaces internally. It won’t be released publicly for at least six months, Dane says.
Other features of the AppDirect platform include better analytics of app consumption within a business. A customer can see the spend per app and use tools to restrict the proliferation of rogue apps.
AppDirect also brings centralised user management to Telstra’s SaaS marketplace. This will soon integrate with Microsoft Active Directory so a customer can import their entire user base and use that to control access to apps by business unit.
“The finance group might need finance apps, the sales team needs a CRM. You start segmenting how you control and distribute apps,” Dane says.
Down the track, Telstra also plans to add single sign-on to the marketplace for instant access to any apps within it.
The Apps Marketplace is already live for new apps such as Box, Docusign, Deputy, Shoeboxed and CakeMail, but customers have to buy T-Suite apps from T-Suite. Telstra is moving very cautiously towards the cutover date for moving customers and apps from T-Suite. It hadn’t yet finalised the changeover date at time of writing.
Hosted takes a hit
Like all other Microsoft resellers, the demand for Office 365 forced Telstra to reposition its established hosted services business. Companies typically pay more for a hosted Exchange and SharePoint solution separately than they do for a combined Office 365 licence.
Telstra’s locally hosted and managed cloud collaboration solutions are now under its hybrid cloud strategy. This line targets customers in regulated industries such as finance, health and government where data sovereignty requires information stay onshore.
The hosted version of SharePoint is also easier to configure and with greater depth of features than SharePoint Online, the respective component within Office 365.
In both cases the hosted solutions are offered as complementary to Telstra’s Office 365 services.
“We offer hybrid deployments for the productivity workloads where a customer has requirements for various levels of security and localisation across their user base,” Telstra said in a prepared statement.
Some well-placed execs in the channel have suggested to CRN that the rise of Office 365 meant Telstra lost money on its investment in hosted Microsoft products. Telstra declined to comment on the size of the investment it had made in its hosted business and whether it had been impacted by the growth of the SaaS arm.
Next: Meet with Telstra’s Mr Cloud
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