Telstra arm wins WAN deal with Aussie property giant

Telstra subsidiary O2 Networks has clinched a Riverbed sale to property owner GPT Group, which owns major Australian shopping centres and office towers, including the MLC Centre and Australia Square in Sydney, Melbourne Central and Highpoint Shopping Centre.

The customer has interests in 16 shopping centres including Charlestown Square in Newcastle, Sunshine Plaza in Maroochydore in Queensland, and Westfield Penrith and Macarthur Square in Sydney.

Office towers in the portfolio include Governor Phillip and Governor Macquarie Towers, Darling Park 1 and 2 and Cockle Bay Wharf in Sydney, Melbourne Central Tower, One One One Eagle Street in Brisbane, in addition to several logistics centres.

GPT Group has more than 500 staff and owns and manages more than $9.4 billion in property assets as well as a funds management platform with $9.6 billion of property assets under management.

The Telstra subsidiary sold the Riverbed Steelhead CX for Cloud to GPT Group, which is using the product to optimise network and application performance across 26 sites on its network after it migrated its on-premise data centre to AWS. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

While O2 Networks sold the technology, the actual rollout was performed by GPT Group, stated IT infrastructure manager at GPT Group, Michael Lockhart.

“As we already had Riverbed devices deployed across our wide area network, we had an internal capability to deploy. We did, however, engage directly with a Riverbed technical resource for a workshop to validate our design and key thoughts,” he told CRN.

GPT already had Riverbed Steelhead at the 26 sites covering Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland and the Northern Territory. The latest rollout saw symmetrical Steelhead CX for Cloud deployments in each of the cloud provider’s two Sydney data centres.

“We’re getting performance that would typically require a much bigger link,” said Lockhart “A standard site for us is only on a 4MB link but with the 5:1 optimisation ratio, we’re getting the equivalent of up to a 20MB link at the same cost.”