Telstra T-Suite takes SaaS forward: Analyst
Telstra T-Suite takes SaaS forward: Analyst
April 3, 2009:Telstra's new T-Suite software-as-a-service (SaaS) retail platform remains somewhat limited – but covers the essentials, according to SteveHodgkinson, Research Director, Public Sector at advisory and consulting firm Ovum.
The SaaS platform includes an HR service to assist companies to comply with Australian employment laws, a CRM suite and hosted Exchange Mail and Sharepoint and file sharing fromSkoot. There are also data security and backup services from Iron Mountain, McAfee and Message Labs.
"Telstra could be accused of being a bit slow off the gun with T-Suite compared to Google’s more cavalier approach to online beta," notedHodgkinson.
"We see the SMB SaaS market as quite different to Google’s global consumer market – smaller and less forgiving of false starts and under-baked services.
"Notwithstanding the general appeal of SaaS, it will be a difficult decision for many SMBs to abandon their current IT arrangements and switch to T-Suite. Many SMBs will likely require multiple sales and support call interactions to decide to buy, migrate from their existing services and get things working properly.
"If and when they trial the service and decide to switch, it had better live up to expectations. Telstra is right to be very choosy about theISVs that it admits onto the T-Suite platform and to carefully test the offerings before going live.
"It will be the Telstra and T-Suite brands that take a beating in the online chat forums if services don’t live up to expectations, and T-Suite’s margins that take a hit if the support staff are too busy."
Telstra has adopted a two-tiered stance to data security and privacy issues – data stored within Telstra’s infrastructure comes under the company’s usual policies. For data stored byISVs, Telstra will take ‘responsible measures’ to require ISVs to implement appropriate policies and to ensure that they do the right thing.
"This is probably the best that can be done at the moment, but our sense is that this is a joker in the deck that could cause trouble, and will require careful watching as the SaaS offerings mature," he concluded.