Microsoft wins five-year digital transformation deal with Australia’s largest telco

Microsoft has secured a five-year partnership with Telstra, Australia’s largest telco, to accelerate the country’s digital transformation.

The agreement is one of the largest partnerships Microsoft has established with a telecommunications provider globally, the companies said today.

As part of this, the agreement is set to boost the tech giant’s connectivity and growth in the country as it will become an “anchor tenant” on Telstra’s new ultra-fast intercity fibre network. Telstra will become Microsoft’s largest supplier of its network capacity requirements on terrestrial fibre in Australia. Additionally, the tech giant will also explore boosting capacity on Telstra’s Asia-Pacific subsea cable network.

The agreement will also drive Telstra’s goal of having around 90% of its applications on public cloud infrastructure by 2025, which includes Microsoft Azure as a preferred cloud partner as part of Telstra's multi-cloud approach.

"Digital technology is foundational to the resilience and differentiation of every organisation," said Satya Nadella, chairman and CEO of Microsoft. "Our partnership brings together Telstra's leadership in network connectivity with the breadth and depth of the Microsoft Cloud to address key challenges, including hybrid work and sustainability, and support Australia's growth."

Telstra also plans to launch a dedicated end-to-end Microsoft practice to help customers across their digital transformation journey by combining Microsoft's cloud, edge and, modern work solutions with Telstra's network leadership and technology experts.

Telstra intends to utilise Microsoft technology like Microsoft 365, Azure, and Teams to bring to market several new industry-based products to help transform the way businesses look at hybrid working and cloud migration. Initially focusing on manufacturing, retail, agriculture, utilities, and finance, these new digital products will be delivered by dedicated end-to-end Microsoft practice within Telstra Purple, Telstra's managed services and technology consulting business.

The two companies already recently developed Branch Offload, Australia’s first 5G-enabled edge computing product for enterprises. It blends Telstra’s 5G and fixed connectivity with Microsoft Azure Stack Edge for edge computing, secure edge, SD-WAN and service orchestration.

The organisations also plan to combine the Telstra Data Hub platform with Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability to help Telstra's enterprise, government, and small business customers to accelerate their sustainability progress and business growth through data insights. The tech giant will also support Telstra with its sustainability cloud to provide data insights into sustainability performance.