SoftLayer and Telstra in cloudy embrace

Australia's dominant telco Telstra, which also operates an AU$2bn a year IT services arn, has struck a deal to resell IBM's SoftLayer cloud down under and is chatting about taking the arrangement global.

Telstra and IBM today announced a new relationship whereby the former's customers are offered access to the latter's cloud over the former's networks. Telstra will resell all of SoftLayer's as-a-services, giving Big Blue a nice leg-up and Telstra customers another cloud to contemplate (the carrier will also operate vCloud Air in Australia, has a few clouds of its own and is a Cisco intercloud buddy).

The Reg has also been told by that IBM and Telstra are “currently working through the commercial and operational mechanisms to extend this to our global customers.” There's “no specific timeframe as yet on this.”

Which brings us back to that AU$2bn a year IT services arm inside Telstra, as should this deal come to pass it will become a global, if smallish, cloud player.

Telstra has form working closely with IBM - the two had a services JV in the late 1990s until Big Blue bought it out in 2003. This new deal probably isn't much more than the two looking at ways to tackle the Australian market. But if it goes global, it could be interesting. ®

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