Optus Business Moves Closer to SingTel

The features that Optus Business has added to its enterprise cloud services include a new storage solution and more pricing and access options. It has also rebranded its portfolio as Optus PowerON, the same brand used by SingTel, and is including cloud consulting services from NCS, SingTel’s IT services company.

These might sound like small changes, but they clearly illustrate SingTel’s intention to roll out a uniform regional cloud offer.

SingTel has a leader position in cloud computing in Singapore. It entered the market early and on multiple fronts, and has a significant number of customers and partnerships with many independent software vendors for developing applications. The challenge has always been to build on its momentum in the domestic market and turn it into pan-Asian success, and taking Optus on board will certainly help SingTel to build a regional proposition. SingTel is not alone in its ambitions, and Ovum expects it to face strong competition from other regional competitors with similar aims, as well as global service providers with aggressive cloud services plans and established relationships with multinational corporations.

Enterprises in the Asia-Pacific region are asking for combined technology solutions that can take advantage of fixed wireless networks and innovations in applications management, and they also need end-to-end SLAs for these. The trick for SingTel and Optus, and indeed any managed service provider in region, will be to combine telemetry solutions (M2M) and wireless broadband transmission with data collection and hosting and fixed international backhaul, and to provide end-user network monitoring across all of these services.

SingTel can use Optus’s valuable knowledge and experience in cloud computing and deeper relationships with vendors such as VMware to help build its own proposition in the Australian market. Joining forces can also contribute to Optus’s cost-efficiency program. Working together across the group is a more efficient way to roll out new services, but investments, especially in delivery capacity, will still be necessary to match competitors’ offerings. Telstra, for example, committed an A$800m investment over five years just to strengthen its cloud capabilities.