Optus Business targets non-traditional markets
Optus has flagged its intention of expanding into new business products, as traditional telcos continue to turn themselves into multi-service providers for the “digital economy”.
At a recent conference, Optus Business Managing Director John Paitaridis said that Optus was seeking to “move outside the enterprise telco space of voice, data and mobiles, where you’ve seen a lot of headwinds in terms of price of data, mobile plans etc... and [into] five key growth areas of unified communications... contact centres, business applications, cloud and datacentre.”
“Those... are major growth areas for the business. We’re not just competing with the telcos, we’re competing with IT service companies and integrators.”
“And in some cases we’re not competing at all; what we’re doing is working with organisations that used to do a lot of this internally, in-house network teams.”
Optus’ plans mirror Telstra’s, with both companies seeking to leverage their core network capabilities to provide high capacity network services to corporates in the Asia Pacific region.
Will these new models create more Australian jobs? The evidence so far is not encouraging, with both Telstra and Optus continuing to locate or relocate much of this business services work offshore.
Security, though, is one concern that can work to local advantage. Optus says it plans to establish a new advanced security operations centre in Australia with a staff of around 100 – a decision welcomed by the CWU.
