Telstra, Accenture create cloud workspace

Telstra and Accenture have set up a collaborative workspace in Melbourne under a cloud computing alliance drawn up last year.

The workspace, established within Telstra's operations group, had core staff from the two companies that would scale up or down in number depending on projects.

The team would not work on "bespoke" cloud solutions for individual customers but to localise Accenture products and designs and optimise them to run on Telstra's network infrastructure before they could be offered more widely, a spokesman for the carrier said.

"Accenture will bring in projects from their innovation labs and we'll work on [them] and make [them] fit for purpose for our cloud infrastructure before taking them to market," the spokesman said.

The workspace operated in a similar fashion to the Accelerated Engineering Lab, which was set up by Telstra and Cisco to optimise Cisco kit to run on Telstra's networks.

The spokesman said the number of core staff contributed by Telstra was a "handful".

He would not be drawn on specific numbers, nor on details of projects that the two firms were working on in Melbourne.

However, it appeared that work under the Federal Government's $466.7 million personally controlled electronic health record (PCEHR) project was high on the agenda for the workspace.

Accenture has been named as the national infrastructure partner for that project; Telstra was understood to have been sub-contracted to host portals on its Silver Lining cloud platform.

Telstra's spokesman said today that the workspace was looking at verticals including health, given Accenture's recent win.

He also said there were solutions being worked on for financial services and a "large application vendor".

Telstra named Accenture its preferred integration partner for the carrier's enterprise cloud computing service codenamed Silver Lining last year.

The three-year alliance was known to have been operating since at least April 2010.

An Accenture spokesman repeatedly refused to reveal how many staff it would contribute to the workspace.