Telstra serves up cloud services to govt clients

The deal means that clients' applications will be hosted in a virtualised environment in Telstra data centers and delivered over Telstra's IP network infrastructure.

Accenture will transition clients' existing applications into the cloud and to provide ongoing support for those applications. The agreement covers both Australia and New Zealand.

Telstra and Accenture said the deal was signed in April and say they have already helped a number of customers (Fulton Hogan and Stella Trav) to “improve productivity through cloud computing”.

Head of Telstra Enterprise and Government, Nerida Caesar, said ,”We have engaged in sessions with 150 customers in groups of about 12 at a time coming in where we have articulated this proposition to them and listened to their issues and concerns."

Dr. Steve Hodgkinson, Research Director at Ovum, added, “A particular issue in Australia is a strongly stated preference by enterprise and government customers for data to remain onshore within Australian legal jurisdiction. This is compounded by the knowledge that the elastic properties of cloud require scale – no CIO wants to be a big customer of a small cloud provider.”