Telstra refreshes its network advantage

Claudio Castelli, Senior Analyst, Ovum

AUSTRALIA: Ovum attended the Telstra Industry Analyst Summit 2011 and was briefed on the company’s strategy. Telstra continues towards its goal of becoming a network-centric applications and services provider: leveraging its share in the traditional carriage business to offer an increasing number of network integrated applications and services relying on the intelligence Telstra is building into its network.

While there are many challenges ahead, especially in building and managing the ecosystem of partners required to succeed, the strategy appears to have already started pay off, with significant revenue growth coming from network application and services.

In the post National Broadband Network (NBN) era Telstra will no longer be able to differentiate on the basis of its access network assets. The way to maintain a competitive advantage is by transforming its network into an intelligent and secure platform for delivering applications and services.

Telstra’s plan is to provide a layered approach that separates the services and application layer from the transport layer for better flexibility, allowing services to be device- and access-agnostic. This will give Telstra the flexibility required to build its services proposition independently of the access network, and allow it to use either its own access assets (fixed or mobile) or from the NBN Co.

To deliver on this strategy Telstra has been investing in its IP network core based on IMS, and developing a series of solutions that form a unique proposition of end-to-end managed services. This includes a range of security products, and forms the basis for its cloud services portfolio.

The recently announced Application Assured Networking solution will allow enterprises to predefine performance metrics for selected applications and allocate bandwidth dynamically on-demand. This online policy control feature, which will be available mid-2012, is a growing customer requirement. Ovum's recent end-user survey shows that 76 per cent of large enterprises in Australia are interested or very interested in the ability to prioritize the performance of individual business applications and 74 per cent in the ability to instantly change the bandwidth of a connection from a portal.

The recent figures suggest that Telstra is on the right track and the strategy is starting to pay off. Revenues from network applications and services (NAS) grew 11 per cent in FY2011 to AUD$1.1 billion, while the traditional carriage business grew only 1per cent.

However, it is cloud services where expectations are greatest. With the recently announced AUD$800 million investment and an increasing number of customers across business and enterprise Telstra seems to be on track to achieve its expected 20 per cent CAGR by 2014.