Optus reveals how channel fits into carrier's cloud

Optus Business has opened up to CRN on the go-to-market strategy for its rapidly growing cloud ecosystem, which is currently a mainly direct model with sparse opportunities for resellers.

This week at the annual Optus Vision strategy update in Sydney, Optus Business managing director John Paitaridis said the carrier aimed to be an adviser, orchestrator and manager of customers’ cloud migrations. It has struck partnerships with Microsoft Azure, AWS, Cisco and will grow its relationships with VMware and IBM.

CRN asked where the indirect channel fits into this scheme, given that rival Telstra has been building an ICT channel to scale its own equivalent cloud services.

For now, Optus Business is taking cloud services to market itself, though Paitaridis didn’t rule out the possibility of growing via resellers in the future, as Optus does in other areas of its business.

“We’ll continue to assess the market opportunity,” he told CRN. “We’ve got indirect models for mobility and some of our other services. [We have] channels for our mobiles, we’ve got channels for some of our unified communication-type services, so this is probably a natural, extensible part of our channel strategy.

“But right now, primarily it’s a direct model to our customers and there’s significant amount of opportunity and work for us to handle there.”

Rather, Optus executives see partners working side-by-side with the carrier, providing professional services rather than reselling. On the flip side, Optus Business can also bring migration expertise, especially in the Microsoft space following the carrier's acquisition of award-winning partner Ensyst.

Microsoft has a “tonne” of partners that need to supply services through an enterprise-grade, orchestrated cloud platform, Paitaridis said. They provide software maintenance and licensing, while Optus might advise and manage on cloud migrations.

Optus vice president of product and ICT David Caspari – a veteran of a channel-led business model following more than a decade at HP, Cisco and Nortel – left the door open on the idea of taking cloud services to resellers.

“Do we have the capability to white label a set of cloud offerings and take them through the channel? Yes. We are maturing that model,” he said. “Do we have a very, very broad ecosystem of partners we work with in the context of our cloud strategy? Absolutely.”

Next: Tying together the telco's cloud

Optus has been making great strides into ICT territory recently.

The carrier revealed $545 million in ICT and managed services revenue for the financial year ending 31 March, and has reported a 30 percent increase in ICT deals in the last 12 months.  

As with Telstra, Optus is positioning itself as a one-stop shop for cloud services. Customers can choose between on-premise, co-location, private, hybrid and public cloud services, including AWS, vCloud Air, IBM Softlayer, Azure and Cisco Intercloud services, as well as application, security and numerous other as-a-service products.

“What you don’t need to do as a customer is go and speak to a multitude of vendors to give you all or any of your cloud outcomes,” Paitaridis said.

Optus now has direct connections into Microsoft Azure as well as AWS, meaning customers can connect securely via enterprise-grade links without data travelling over the internet.

Underpinning this are data centres in Sydney and Melbourne, as well as the ability to partner with the likes of NextDC for extra capacity where necessary. Customers have access to virtual compute and storage.

On the services side, Optus Business offers managed application services include unified communications-as-a-service, software-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service and contact centre-as-a-service. Its Xmatters service is an “intelligent” messaging service that can route urgent outage alerts to the most appropriate IT staff.

Rounding out the end-to-end capabilities are implementation, consulting and design, project services and managed services, including managed security services.

While the portfolio grows broader – this week Optus Business announced enterprise document records management as-a-service, possibly dubbed EDRMaaS – there are some areas it hasn’t touched. It isn’t planning on making complex ERP migrations and CRM consulting its focus, for example.

“A lot of operators in the market are trying to be everything to everyone,” Caspari said. “Enterprise and government are looking for companies that are focussed and have built deep capabilities around certain areas.”