Telstra has opened up to CRN on its cloud infrastructure strategy, a complex web spanning multiple data centres and deals with several third-party public cloud providers.
The telco's vision is to have a cloud solution for every customer requirement - and it wants the ICT channel to take these myriad products to market.
In February, it invited about 60 partners to join its own internal technical training, where the agenda spanned Telstra's own infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform, VMware vCloud Air, Cisco Cloud Services and its latest public cloud partnership with IBM SoftLayer.
[The moving pieces behind Telstra's massive IaaS strategy]
Brendan Donohoe, executive director of Telstra Business Solution Sales, told CRN how these three public IaaS platforms each suit different customer requirements: vCloud Air for virtualised VMware environments; Cisco for "web-scale" applications; and SoftLayer for "bare metal" applications, such as legacy apps that can't be virtualised.
Telstra also runs its own CSX cloud platform, powered by its investment in hardware from EMC and Cisco, software licences from VMware and BMC and an application migration and integration partnership with Accenture.
CSX customers can use a credit card to spin up multi-tenant and dedicated virtual machines hosted in Telstra data centres in Melbourne, Perth and Sydney and points of presence in Hong Kong, Singapore and the United Kingdom.
In terms of the two biggest public cloud players, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, Telstra also provides direct connections into their points of presence; Telstra was announced as a launch partner when Microsoft went live with its Azure public cloud from two Australian data centres late last year.
Telstra has also sewn up a partnership with ASX-listed co-location company NextDC. For customers that are not ready to migrate to a public cloud, but don't want to run infrastructure on their own premises, Telstra helps them migrate into NextDC co-lo facilities.
"Some customers are still adamant, 'My data centre is so critical to me I want to run my own application server and data centre myself'. Some of those customers come to us for disaster recovery," said Donohoe.
"Some are sick of running their own data centre - it is costing them fortune, it is too risky - so they ask if we will run their data centre. They might want to run their own server and their own applications; that solution is NextDC.
"Or they decide they don't want to run their own servers, so they come and say they want a cloud or an IaaS conversation," he added.
Telstra has struck a deal with VCE so that these managed private cloud customers are hosted on high-end Vblock converged infrastructure within NextDC; Telstra will also resell Vblocks to customers that want to keep their applications on-premise.
Next: opportunities for Telstra partners
All of these services come under the umbrella of Telstra's Network Applications & Services (NAS) business, the $2 billion unit that has swallowed up a trio of Australian resellers: NSC Group, O2 Network and Bridge Point Communications.
Donohoe said partners should see this as an opportunity, not competition.
"When I bring this story to our partners, they just rub their hands together. The partners we are working with have stepped into the 21st century.
"We brought this home with the training - a deep dive in IBM, in Cisco and in VMware - and they walked out and said, 'This is absolutely amazing and I cannot wait to talk to customers about these opportunities.'"
[The moving pieces behind Telstra's massive IaaS strategy]
One partner in attendance was Jason McClintock, managing director of Melbourne-based Jasco Consulting.
McClintock, who is also chairman of Telstra's Business & Enterprise Partner Executive Council, said the holistic cloud strategy was still a "work in progress" but that he believes Telstra could become all things to all cloud customers.
"Whatever the cloud service is, in time there will be an option from Telstra. If it is an Office 365 solution plus IaaS with Telstra's dedicated hosting and you also need some co-location – or even in the future some Windows Azure or AWS or whoever – Telstra would be that one-stop shop to be able to aggregate all of those technologies into a single solution."
McClintock said Telstra clearly sees a significant role for resellers in all of this.
"I have been in this industry for 20 years and it is the first time I have seen a vendor en masse [let partners] do their internal training with their internal staff. I have spent a decade with Microsoft and there is tonnes of training with Microsoft and I have never been on their training," said McClintock.
Close partners can get access to some of Telstra's 31,000 managed accounts across Australia, said Stephen Chapman, innovation and strategy director at AVC, which was Telstra's first cloud partner in Australia.
"Telstra is Cisco's largest cloud builder and we at AVC are Cisco's best-performing cloud reseller globally… we are their global leader because of the partnership with Telstra and Cisco."
Chapman sees AVC as a pioneer in this new breed of Telstra partner, not the mobile and telephony dealers of the past, but ICT solutions providers that can build their own services around Telstra's public and private cloud infrastructure.
AVC has seen upside of the Telstra cloud partnership with project for clients such as Make A Wish Australia, employment services provider Campbell Page and Austral Wright Metals, which is the main supplier of non-ferrous metals to the Australian Mint.
"For all three of those clients, we have done a platform migration from their existing obsolete or outdated on-premise equipment to Telstra's IaaS, and then we have also provided managed services to those clients," said Chapman. In future, similar migrations could end up on Cisco, VMware or IBM IaaS platforms.
"We see the opportunity around Telstra's multi-cloud strategy… We see the opportunity to provide multiple-platform access for clients so we can put the right apps on the right platforms for clients with a very tightly integrated network solutions.
"If there's an application that suits Azure or SoftLayer or vCloud or Cisco, we can help clients put the right application in the right place," Chapman added.
Melbourne-based Byte Information Technology is another channel partner to have joined in the past three years as "Telstra, with their own service offering have looked to partners to onboard their existing customers and new customers onto those platforms", said solution sales manager Nicholas Johnson.
Matthew Merriel, solutions consultant at Byte, sees full IaaS, rather than co-location, as the end game for the majority of customers, but said the NextDC deal was letting Telstra use its own data centres to build out this cloud portfolio.
"What has worked really well is that the partnership with NextDC enables you to build a solution that utilises some of the more recent options and technology that NextDC and other providers are offering, but it is also a providing benefit to Telstra, to free up their existing space to then provide a lot of their cloud platforms and other networking options, such as edge devices and cloud managed gateways.
"We have not had a lot of customers move into NextDC; most have seen the value in not having the hardware at all ... most who have co-location are looking to reduce those final steps of administrative overhead and those moving from on-prem don't want to do that halfway step," added Merriel.
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