Komatsu signs Telstra for five years

Komatsu Australia has signed up with Telstra for its communications needs and has migrated to the telco’s managed ICT Infrastructure as a Service platform.

The construction and mining equipment company will pay Telstra $35 million over five years for voice, mobile voice and managed data services for its 1800 staff spread across Australia, New Zealand and New Caledonia.

Under the deal, 1200 Telstra Next G mobile services, 400 wireless broadband devices, and 150 wireless email devices connected to the Microsoft Mobile Enterprise Solution will be delivered.

The infrastructure as a service platform will provide Komatsu with security, computing, storage, and a geographically dispersed real time robust disaster recovery environment.

In addition, Telstra will manage hardware and software which was formerly managed in-house by Komatsu.

Moving to enterprise utility computing will also allow give Komatsu scalable computing power and storage via a shared environment within the Telstra cloud allowing the company to add new servers or extra storage capacity on demand .

Previously it took Komatsu up to two months to deliver the same capability through traditional hardware partners.

Komatsu has been a partner for three years prior to the new deal. The relationship has seen Komatsu’s standard carriage environment into a managed network including Mobility and Microsoft collaboration tools.

Komatsu’s general manager IT, Ian Harvison, said the company had signed the expansive deal as it needed to build a flexible computing environment to support a number of critical projects, including an SAP expansion.