Versent and AWS partner to drive cloud migration, AI modernisation

Versent has signed a five year strategic collaboration agreement (SCA) with Amazon Web Services (AWS), focused on AI-driven cloud migrations, agentic AI modernisation and Telstra connectivity-accelerated cloud solutions.

The SCA builds on prior collaborations between Versent and AWS and focuses on joint go-to-market initiatives across commercial and public sector customers.

The collaboration aims to provide a faster, more reliable pathway from proof of concept to production, supported by Versent’s end-to-end lifecycle model - from strategy and migration through to build, managed services, and continuous optimisation. In addition, customers can benefit from streamlined procurement through AWS Marketplace offerings.

Pip Gilbert, head of partner at AWS Australia and New Zealand, said agentic AI is reshaping how organisations operate, and the potential is enormous.

"Capturing that value requires partners with the technical depth and operational expertise to deliver it responsibly and at scale," she stated.

"This agreement puts a framework around that, giving customers a clear path from concept to production."

Paul Nicholls, CEO of Versent, said as organisations think about how to use AI to drive measurable outcomes and scale that in a secure, predictable manner, gaining the understanding of how to do that at an enterprise scale and drive transformation is something the SCA enables for the company.

"Having this SCA provides a structured, repeatable way for us to achieve that, working with AWS to help how we change our delivery models with clients," he told techpartner.news.

"One of the elements here is building on our sovereign, secure cloud capability, which includes connectivity; we want to then think about how connectivity evolves to be much more like cloud services, so you can turn them off, turn them on, dial up, dial down, quality of service, performance, security, as makes sense for the use case.

"Think about the combination of AI being able to drive how you manage enterprise level networks, in line with applications or user personas - [that's] something we think can really change the way networking is consumed [to be] more like cloud services."

On the point of sovereignty, Nicholls said that the drive to have predictability, security and clarity around how data is being used and where workloads are being managed is only increasing in priority.

"Obviously it's driven from a compliance perspective, but you take AI - our view is it only creates value if it's deployed at scale quite safely, and that means security, privacy, data sovereignty," he explained.

"That might mean sovereignty - clarity around where your data is and how it's been used. We made some decisions around how we think about our own AI platforms and sovereignty and understanding where data is stored and managed.

"One of the things that we we're looking at doing is sharing our experience around that for customers, including giving access to our policies around how we think about it. It's only going to stay a high priority because clearly it has implications around cyber as well."

Acquisition has company, customers "excited"

In August of last year, it was announced that Infosys will acquire 75% of the shareholding in manager services provider Versent. Infosys will have operational control, while Telstra will continue to retain a 25% minority stake in Versent.

While the move is still waiting on final approvals, Nicholls said that customers are "excited" as they understand what the value proposition of Versent and Infosys can mean - scaling up and down across a large customer base.

"There's a model there that we will still act as that local, sovereign integrator for Infosys at the front end for acquisition and innovation, [plus] the technology partner in cloud, digital and data for Telstra and its clients," he said.

"The thing we're really excited about is we get access to a whole bunch of global IP around industry. It’s harder for a services business of our scale to develop a bunch of leading industry capability that we can bring to our clients locally. We've got good industry expertise and depth, but it's a little bit organic versus more of an industrial machine that we can we can leverage from [in] Infosys.

"With the AWS SCA, we can export some of those capabilities to Infosys’ global customers as well."