Optus reveals how channel fits into carrier'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.”