Telstra Brings Integration, On Demand to SMB Market

First out of the box will be security and collaboration software. Initial T-Suite services include on-demand security offerings from McAfee and MessageLabs, online data backup from Iron Mountain, Hosted Exchange messaging and SharePoint collaboration services from Microsoft, as well as Microsoft Dynamics hosted CRM.

The Jamcracker partnership allows Telstra to extend its software catalog outside of Microsoft and Telstra’s home-grown applications. While offering on-demand applications, the JSDN also lets Telstra set up Web stores for its channel partners to use for sales.

Jamcracker, which got its start in 1999 when founded by KB Chandrasekhar, who also founded one of the original hosting, or application, service providers, Exodus, has spent the last several years since the telecom meltdown BPM revamping the idea of hosting.

“While the ASP model emerging then was flawed and some of the people providing those services were ISPs one day and trying to do hosting the next,” said Steve Crawford, vice president of marketing for Jamcracker, “the basic idea of software being delivered over a network was obviously [sound.]”

Broadband penetration wasn’t ready then. Nor were the applications; there were only a handful. So Jamcracker, a company comprising 95 percent engineers, went to work building a better platform. “Today the market is on fire for delivering out-of-band services, cloud services, hosted services or SaaS — whatever you want to call it,” Crawford said.

The Jamcracker platform allows Telstra to bundle hosted applications from Microsoft with third-party applications. It uses a federated architecture whereby Telstra runs as a node in the network that sources services from Jamcracker’s global services catalog, while on-boarding their own core services.

Crawford said a key to differentiating SaaS is unifying the service delivery lifecycle and creating a seamless experience among all services. Another key is providing a platform that new, yet-to-be-defined services can be plugged into when they are ready. “For a carrier to figure out what the killer app would be three years from now would be very difficult,” he said.

Crawford added that Telstra will start slowly, adding services when they’re ready. “It’s like going back to the late 90s. You have to work your way up the value chain and build confidence in your customer base,” Crawford said.

In the long run, Telstra likely will uncover interesting SaaS applications that haven’t made it outside Australia yet, and will be able to redistribute those applications using Jamcracker’s SDN. “This gives Telstra the opportunity to provide applications to other carriers they don’t view as competitors.