Telstra expands cloud platform to US, Japan

Following its EU and APAC expansion this summer, ICT and backbone network service provider Telstra Global announced Thursday that the company has expanded its cloud and “connected colocation” services to the US and Japan, and is in the process of upgrading existing facilities in Australia.

Telstra Global told Telecoms.com sister site Business Cloud News in June that the company was looking at entering the highly competitive US infrastructure as a service market towards the end of 2013. True to its word, the company said it is partnering with third party datacentre operators in in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and San Jose to offer its own cloud platform as well as colocation services.

The company is offering these same services from its new datacentre in Tokyo, and it also announced the availability of low-latency network services from its datacentre in Singapore, extending Telstra Global’s reach in the Asia-Pacific region more broadly.

All told, Telstra Global now offers its cloud and colocation services from 18 datacentres globally.

“These capabilities will meet the rapidly growing demand for integrated network and cloud services of our media and financial organisations. The expanded offering showcases a level of innovation that is designed to serve our customers seeking the flexibility of cloud computing solutions for their businesses,” said Martin Bishop, head of network application and services portfolio at Telstra Global.

The company also said that it is adding 155 racks to its Sydney datacentre.

The latest expansion efforts follow Telstra Global’s recent move to build out new cloud capacity in London, Hong Kong and Singapore this summer, all part  of a broader £500 million investment in its global cloud computing initiatives announced in 2011.

While Tesltra Global isn’t a telco (its parent is), Bishop told Business Cloud News that its pitch relies on a combination of offering end-to-end (consulting, migration, and technology) services and global connectivity in one package; it’s also worth pointing out that the company built its cloud platform from the ground up, rather than nabbing a white label offering. But the company’s entrance into new regions will also bring it into closer competition with regionally established players offering similar packages of cloud and colocation services that leverage network connectivity, like NTT (in Japan) and Verizon Terremark (in the US), and of course established IT players.