Optus Business is re-branding its Cloud product line-up and adding new offerings to capitalise on opportunities in the Asia-Pacific region.
The telco’s Business division services corporate, enterprise, and government customers with more than 200 employees.
Optus aims to move away from being just a communications provider but rather a full-scale ICT business. To do so, its parent company, SingTel, underwent major restructuring two months ago which split its divisions up based on customer segments as opposed to geographical location.
This means Optus is now able to leverage the capabilities of its sister companies across the Asia-Pacific region. Group ICT is the overarching division Optus Business sits under.
“It’s about extending regional opportunities while expanding on local capabilities,” Optus Business managing director, John Paitaridis, said.
The re-branding of Optus’ Cloud portfolio to PowerON reflects this move as it directly aligns with SingTel’s PowerON offerings which are already available in the Singapore market.
Telcos have been advised by analysts to broaden their reach in the business segment as margins in the consumer sector continues to fall.
Optus Business will begin to introduce new Cloud services in the second half of the year. Part of this process will involve federating SingTel-owned Cloud infrastructure across Australia, Singapore, and Hong Kong.
SingTel datacentres in all three countries run on a common platform: VMware’s vCloud.
“We have multiple datacentres as part of Group ICT and we are talking about a federated Cloud which will allow our customers to fully host their applications closer to where their users are in the region but also provide options around things like local sovereignty of data,” Paitaridis said.
Customers can then manage their applications from a single portal interface.
Additionally, the telco will release a pay-as-you-go payment model for its infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings which will have options to pay for ‘burstable’ consumption.
Optus is planning to kick-off a new enterprise Cloud storage service with details to be revealed closer to launch.
The telco is also revving up its mobile play in the enterprise space.
It has introduced a new product for enterprise customers to easily protect their mobile devices, Optus Mobile Device Security (MDS) based on Juniper Networks Juno Pulse Mobile Security Suite.
