A Telstra executive has said its IT services unit is “still in the growth phase”, even after it raked in $1.3 billion of revenue in the latest half-year.
The Network Applications & Services unit of Telstra is on track for a $2.7 billion financial year, with single-digit growth expected for the second half.
The $1.3 billion mark for the half ending 31 December represented 32.7 percent sales growth compared to the first half of the 2015 financial year.
“NAS is still in the growth phase,” chief financial officer Warwick Bray said. “We are continuing to build momentum in terms of enhancing scale and capability and evolving the business mix for profitable growth.”
“NAS revenue has achieved more than 20 percent growth for five of the last seven halves, and now has annualised revenues of around $2.5 billion.”
Cloud, Integrated Services and Industry Solutions business lines were massive contributors to NAS’ half-year result.
“Cloud revenue grew by 50.8 percent due to infrastructure and data services, software-as-a-service and professional services,” Bray said.
“As an example, we are working with a large supermarket to implement a world class hybrid cloud solution to deliver to our customer; speed to market, cost reductions and the ability to consume cloud services on demand.”
During 2015, Telstra joined forces with AWS, VMWare, Cisco and IBM to put together the country’s biggest cloud network.
Industry Solutions grew 44.2 percent in revenue mainly thanks to “increased NBN commercial works and wireless network deployments”, while Integrated Services sales was up 66 percent “due to the achievement of transition and transformation milestones on major accounts, and growth from annuity managed services”.
Bray boasted of vendor recognition for Telstra’s IT solutions arm.
“We have been recognised externally with a number of industry awards for service excellence and innovation. These include Cisco APJ Collaboration Partner of the Year and Data Centre Dynamics Asia-Pacific Data Centre Transformation of the Year.”
The top bean counter also noted that, in the unified comms area, vanilla solutions were increasingly popular, allowing the telco to cut costs.
“Across managed network services and unified communications, our enterprise customers are continuing to adopt standardised offerings to a much higher degree. This improves our speed of implementation and lowers our unit costs - and provides improved quality and reliability for our customers.”
Overall the giant Australian telco slightly increased its net profit to $2.1 billion for the half-year, delivering an interim dividend of 15.5 cents per share. Telstra shares were at $5.40 as of 12pm Wednesday - 2 cents down from Tuesday.
Telstra was recognised last year as a CRN MVP for its diversity in gold-level vendor relationships as a solutions provider.
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