Telstra finalises moves off Siebel, Teradata, Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Telstra has reached a significant milestone in its multi-year IT estate transformation and simplification, exiting its 20-year-old Siebel CRM, alongside Teradata, Veritas and Pivotal Cloud Foundry.

The system retirements mean the vendor software and underlying infrastructure can now be decommissioned.

Group executive Product & Technology Kim Krogh Andersen told the iTnews Podcast it’s a milestone that only a select cohort of organisations chasing transformation actually reach.

“We have looked at big CRM, simplification and migration programs across the world, and still my latest number is that more than 80 percent of them are failing and only 10-to-15 percent are really successful,” Andersen said.

“We’ve experienced this ourselves. We've had a few attempts where we got most of [the work] done, but we didn't get the long tail and the difficult part in the end closed down, and that means you still sit there with some legacy in your environment.”

“So, I'm super proud that we actually [now] get into that bucket of the 10-to-15 percent globally that get the job done.

“That's a credit to the entire Telstra team, from the Board keeping challenging us, to the management, to the frontline employees that have these difficult conversations with customers where they need to transition to the new environment, to the software people, to the whole company.

“It's been a massive journey, but I really created the stamina to get it done, to not stop when it's become difficult, but just push through that and get to the other side of it.” 

Andersen - who has been with Telstra since the start of 2020 - marked the occasion a month ago with a LinkedIn post. 

Siebel’s long switch-off

This was spurred by the migration of the final customer off Telstra’s Siebel CRM system - most are now migrated onto a newer Salesforce CRM.

Siebel, he wrote, “had been Telstra’s core CRM for close to two decades.”

“Over that time it accumulated millions of customers, thousands of products and plans, and an extraordinary number of edge cases,” he wrote.

“Unwinding that — while continuing to serve customers every day — has been one of the most complex transformations I’ve seen.

“Over the journey, the team migrated more than 8 million consumer and small business customers, ran old and new platforms safely in parallel for years, untangled decades of legacy data, plans and dependencies, and deliberately worked through the hardest customers last, not first.”

Customers are now on a modern CRM system and are served by a vastly simpler and smaller set of telecommunications plans, down from 1800 at one time to 20 - another key output of Telstra’s transformation.

The migration off of Siebel took place over a number of years, peaking last year when 203,000 services were moved in a single week.\

The final customers, and services, to be migrated off Siebel were among the most challenging, however.

“The last part of the migration, which started in July 2025, was really a complicated one where we had around 60,000 customers that have very customised, specific services that we manually needed to migrate,” Andersen said.

“The last mile we have just got done now has been super manual and we have really been in contact with most of these customers, handholding to ensure that every single customer got across in the best possible way.”

While the approach meant added cost and time to the migration, it had ultimately proven to be the correct one.

“I've been operating these kinds of [projects] across the globe and others are doing it differently where it's more a ‘big bang’,” Andersen said.

“We have really taken a conscious approach to this to ensure we get the customers over to the new environment in a way that there's as little pain in that transition as possible,

“We have not seen an increase in complaints. Every time we get people to the new environment, we have seen increased NPS [net promoter score, a measure of customer satisfaction], fewer complaints, and also that people want to stay with us longer.

“So overall it has been a massive success, but like many of these [projects], they always take a little longer than you expect, and they also cost a little bit more than you expect.”

Untangling Siebel

The complexity wasn’t just in the customer and service migration; as with other large Australian organisations that have successfully retired and decommissioned core IT systems, Telstra had to separate Siebel from its broader environment.

The system was heavily customised - in part, a by-product of the heavily regulated environment that Telstra operates in - and had become integrated with dozens of other systems.

“We needed to get Siebel decoupled from 54 other applications [and] untangle all that complexity and hardcoded interfaces into the CRM,” Andersen said.

“We have enterprise customers that somehow ended up in Siebel that should not be in Siebel. We have ecommerce systems, we have office facilities, we have insolvency management, and a lot of different processes that somehow became hardcoded and interlinked into the CRM system.”

AI-assisted

For retiring other systems, including Teradata and Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF), artificial intelligence was used to accelerate efforts.

Andersen said that AI was used, for example, to refactor applications that had used PCF to run in the public cloud, for example.

“AI is probably one of the most important tools to accelerate some of the refactoring, modernisation and even exit of your estate,” he said.

“If you look at our Teradata, it was intended to take much longer [to move away from] than it took, and the reason for us being able to do it faster was AI.

“The same with the PCF platform. We expected it to take three times the time of what it actually did, and that was again, because we have used AI in that refactoring.”