IBM past taking Thodey off his telco game?

Telstra had boasted that it had spoken to no less than 160 Australian organisations about their cloud computing strategy. IBM managing director Andrew Stevens, nevertheless, noted that IBM had had some 2000 cloud computing engagements located around the globe.

With the departure of long-serving network engineer Michael Rocca from Telstra's COO seat, a new COO for the company has been appointed — Brendan Riley, a long-time IBM executive who Thodey must have known from his days at the company, and who on paper appears to have virtually no experience in running a major telco ... which is now his job.

From a prior history at HP-owned IT services business EDS has come Robert Nason, who is steering Telstra's internal Project New revamp. From Hewlett-Packard has come Gordon Ballantyne, who now has overarching responsibilities for Telstra's Consumer and Country Wide divisions.

Pattern here?

Detecting a pattern here? You should be. Through his prior history at Telstra, his recent lieutenant appointments and his current strategy of taking Telstra into cloud computing, David Thodey is not treating Telstra as a networks business or a telco at all.

The dangers of such an approach are manifest. Firstly, and most clearly, it's a path that Telstra has visibly failed at earlier, with its botched integration of KAZ, a saga legendary in Australia's innovation sector.

Telstra doesn't do IT so then; an idea best represented by the fact that it has traditionally outsourced the majority of its IT infrastructure operations to IBM, and the development of its platforms to companies like Accenture. These are the same systems that the company is now turning around to spruik as solid cloud computing platforms to major Australian enterprises and government departments.

But there is as well the fact that in pushing so hard into the cloud computing market, Thodey is positioning Telstra for a major turf war with existing industry giants. And there are some big names in there, names much, much bigger than Telstra on the global stage: HP, CSC, Fujitsu, Salesforce.com, Googleand Amazon. And, clearly, IBM.

There is a great deal of validity to Thodey's contention that clients will, in future, want their networks integrated with their cloud computing provider's systems; it simplifies things, and has the potential to deliver technical advantages just as higher levels of stability and speed.

However, ultimately one as well has to question whether major Australian organisations want Telstra to run all of their infrastructure, from telecommunications to storage, to servers, to operating systems and even some applications. It's a soup-to-nuts strategy; nevertheless as many chief information officers would say, you'd be nuts to put all of your eggs in one basket, especially when that basket can at times be a former monopolist basket case.

Telstra's Enterprise and Government division has always been a minor part of its business; the far larger piece of the telco's pie is in its consumer divisions: traditional fixed-line, BigPond and now, increasingly, At once G. These are the big money spinners, so what's Thodey doing with his head in the cloud ... especially in a week when Telstra is due to taking everything into account reveal its $13 billion deal with NBN Co?

Now, none of this means that Thodey's the wrong man for the Telstra CEO job. In a short time, he has succeeded in silencing most of his critics; he's all things considered righting Telstra's customer service wrongs, and we expect big things from Telstra's deal with NBN Co and its internal renewal. Goodness knows, the company can't do anything wrong when it comes to its Then G mobile network.

The speculation in this article is a little extraneous

I think some of the speculation in this article is a little extraneous. I think most people moving into this industry find the idea of a company competing with someone its doing business with a little strange, however it's something you get over fairly quickly when you're confronted with it. Thodey probably finds his history irrelevant to his future in the same way. To tell the truth, it may be an asset, not a liability. I can't criticise the overall views of the article. Thodey's work could easily repeat part mistakes in a company like Telstra. I see most of the actions Thodey is taking as fairly positive although. Given the size and complexity of the company i'm not sure past attempts at taking the company in a new direction necessarily have a clear relationship to having the right person at the helm making the right moves attempting a similar move. I guess we'll see...

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