Randstad eyes cloud move to Telstra

Recruitment and human resources consultancy Randstad will move to Telstra's infrastructure-as-a-service offering over the next three years, with a view to outsourcing all communications and infrastructure work for its Asia Pacific offices to the telco.

The company’s Sydney data centre currently provides the backbone for its operations, including a Citrix-based thin client environment that caters for 1000 employees in Australia, New Zealand and Singapore.

Regional chief information officer Kevin O’Neill told iTnews that Randstad had initially sought to consolidate its telecommunications contracts from five suppliers to one, with data centre migration and potential cloud offerings an afterthought.

Under a three-year contract with Telstra, Randstad will move all fixed line, mobile and international MPLS network requirements to the telco.

Telstra will provide fibre connections to the vast majority of the company’s regional offices and renew a fleet of 350 mobile devices, including iPads and some mobile broadband dongles to operate over Telstra’s 4G network.

Randstad will also gradually replace its legacy hardware with services from Telstra’s cloud -- a move O'Neill described as "baby steps" and "not a go-to-the-cloud type thing".

The HR firm plans to migrate infrastructure from an in-house data centre to a Telstra colo facility in Sydney. Phase one of the project is expected to conclude by June.

Randstad will also look to overhaul its disaster recovery strategy with a key focus on taking up storage and server offerings from Telstra’s cloud as a first step.

As its Dell and EMC servers and storage reach end-of-life in the next three years, O’Neill said his team would undertake a case-by-case analysis of whether to replace them with cloud services.

“We’re reasonably conservative, we don’t want to jump straight into the cloud; it has to fit with the business and we also have to manage our business operations,” he said.

In doing so, Randstad will join growing ranks of clients on Telstra’s cloud project. The telco's cloud service, once code-named ‘Silver Lining’, has courted the likes of Komatsu and Visy, while partially relying on a partnership with Accenture to garner more business.

Telstra has so far refused to disclose how many clients have signed onto its cloud service.

It expects to invest $800 million on the service in the five years to 2016, launching a self-provisioning portal and public pricing late last year.

For Randstad, O’Neill said the initial data centre migration could also open up the company to re-negotiating for cloud-based email and producitivity applications, though O’Neill said that would likely involve Randstad's Holland headquarters.

“Then the next time we have a SAN renewal come up we’ll certainly look at getting cloud storage from Telstra,” he said.

“If we need any virtual machines for development work, those are the sorts of things that open up to us. Those sorts of things start to come into the frame but certainly it will be a three-year strategy.”