Azure Stack Hub Partner Solutions Series – TelekomTelstra

Tibe, smile. Or is he frozen? Or does he just not smile? >> That’s poor network quality. >> Now you’re good. >> Okay. Go. >> Let’s do that. Hey, welcome, everyone, to a new video in our Azure Stack Hub Partner Solution video series. I’m again joined by Tiberiu Radu from the Azure Stack Hub team, which always introduced me to new partner solutions. How is it going, Tibe, and who I’m going to speak to today? >> Hello Thomas. Hello, everyone. Today, we are going to meet with Telkomtelstra.

00:44 - They are a service provider in a very specific region and they’re offering managed services to their customers. As before, in this series, we’re covering solutions with Azure Stack Hub starting with a managed service provider, ISVs partners and all kinds of combinations in between. I think John will have a good story to walk you through their journey. >> That sounds awesome. I’m really looking forward to that. Let’s switch over to John. Thank you very much, Tibe. >> My name is John Gageanu and I am from Telkomtelstra Indonesia. I am their Azure Stack Architecture Manager.

01:38 - Telkomtelstra is a joint venture between two large telecommunication services companies, Telkom Indonesia and Telstra Australia. We are based in Jakarta, Indonesia, and we provide a range of technologies and many services to enterprise and government customers in Indonesia. Examples of services we provide; we provide Managed Network Services, managed security services, we are the leading hybrid Cloud service provider in Indonesia, as well as we have a very successful Cloud Contact Center Solution. We also provide unified communications using Microsoft Teams and the full suite of office productivity tools provided by Microsoft 365. >> That is awesome. Now, thank you very much, again, for having you on this call. >> Thank you. >> I just going to quickly ask you.

02:37 - You mentioned you’re a managed service provider and you offer obviously different services to clients. Can you speak a little bit more about what your clients are, who your clients are, and how that works, and what are your customers? >> Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, Thomas. Our customers are typically Indonesian enterprises or multinational companies that established a presence in Indonesia. Their activity is usually in key industry verticals such as financial services, production and manufacturing, energy, oil and gas, as well as government and public services. >> That sounds like a good amount of customers and a good solution for these customers. Obviously, you’re using Azure Stack Hub.

03:32 - I want to quickly ask you, why did you choose the Azure Stack Hub Solutions and why, for example, also, do your customers choose Azure Stack Hub or that specific Azure Stack Hub Solution and services you’re offering? >> Sure. Several years ago, our customers at the time, managed network services customers started to talk to us about their Cloud migration journey as part of their digitization strategy. Many of our customers have very specific data sovereignty requirements and very tight security requirements. At that time, Azure Stack Hub was still called Azure Stack Technical Preview 2 and 3. We were very impressed by the potential that the technology showed from the early stages.

04:28 - The fact that Azure Stack Hub is an extension of Azure, it provides a range of Azure services in our data centers, which we can then on sell to our customers. We saw the potential in the market for building a Azure Stack based hybrid Cloud portfolio of services. We joined the Microsoft Early Adopters Program for Azure Stack, and we have since been working in partnership with Microsoft to build the successful hybrid Cloud business in Indonesia. From the beginning, what we found is that integrating Azure Stack Hub into our ITIL-compliant processes and tools was very straightforward with the use of the rich set of APIs that Azure Stack provides, which are fully consistent with the APIs that Azure provides. Our customers, on the other hand, were very impressed by the consistency between Azure Stack and Azure in terms of using the same portal, the same Azure Resource Manager templates, the APIs, similar Kubernetes, container technology used on both platforms.

05:55 - The fact that the DevOps tools can be used across Azure Public Cloud and Azure Stack Hub. Additionally, the customers who have data sovereignty requirements are well served by our Azure Stack Hub platforms which are located in Indonesia. >> No, that sounds awesome. I love, by the way, that you’re a long-term partner of us, and you were very early on involved in Azure Stack Hub and in the development of Azure Stack Hub, of course. In your case, it’s really bringing that consistent experience closer to your customers in terms of obviously networking, latency, and things like that, but also data sovereignty reasons, right? >> Absolutely. >> Perfect. Now, this is great. You’re providing this platform. Again, you have a whole set of different customers using that.

06:58 - Can you talk a little bit about more how the customers, for example, are using the platform in a way and how that actually provide value, and what they’re building on top of it? >> Yeah, sure. To start with, we provide the hosting services for our customers on our Azure Stack platforms which are located in different data centers in Indonesia, which then, again, provides the low latency and data sovereignty compliance. We provide the full set of professional services to help our customers identify opportunities for migrating to the Cloud for redeveloping their applications, for innovation, and scaling up their applications. In that respect, we provide Cloud migration assessment, we provide strategy development for Cloud migration as well as detailed planning. Also we execute or work with the customer to execute the migration of applications from on-premises to Azure Stack Hub as well as Azure in a controlled and secure manner. We also do backups for our customers.

08:20 - We ensure that the business is always available by replicating data between our Azure Stack platforms in different data centers, as well as we use the Azure Site Recovery Service to backup data onto Azure Public Cloud. We ensure that the security of our customers business is solid with a combination of security technologies, security intelligence, data analytics, and expert teams, which then enable enterprises to run their business successfully and with confidence. Additionally, we provide support for the network component of Hybrid Cloud applications all the way from the public Azure to Azure Stack Hub, as well as to the customer premises or customer data centers, all the way to the remote premises where we can also support the customer premises equipment. We overlay everything with an integrated service management framework, which is fully ITIL-compliant, which includes 24 by 7 monitoring support, customer notifications, which is underpin them by industry leading service level commitments which we meet and exceed on a consistent basis. Additionally, we provide customers with access to our infinity portal, which then provides them end-to-end visibility of their performance of their services across all the technologies. >> Now that’s pretty cool.

You’re not just providing 10:09 - the Azure Stack and Azure platform basically to your customers, but you’re also adding on value on top of this. Again, you mentioned for example, the networking connectivity, but then also help with the Cloud journey when it comes to migration. The Cloud setup for applications and stuff like that, so really helping them on the way on their own Cloud journey as well. >> Absolutely. We’ve built a lot of customer loyalty through this and Azure Stack Hub as a key component of our Hybrid Cloud product portfolio, has been a key underpinning for our success. >> That’s awesome, that’s great to hear. We may really ask almost last question is obviously you see how your customers are using the platform, like what they are building and what you see them using the most.

11:12 - What services are they using on top of Azure Stack Hub? >> Yeah, sure. Requirements vary quite a lot between customers and also for any one customer throughout the life-cycle of their application and of their engagement with us. For example, a customer who may be in an early phase of their Cloud migration journey may start with using Infrastructure as a Service features of Azure Stack Hub, virtual machines, virtual networks, VPNs, storage, the Key Vault, for example, is a starting point. Then over time as the Cloud journey continues and the customer becomes more confident and they start redeveloping maybe their on-premises applications with a view to migrating them to Cloud and build or acquire new Cloud ready applications then the customer starts making use of Platform as a Service features such as computer less, serverless computing, Web Apps, Kubernetes containers. We can also make ourselves. We also make extensive use of ARM templates and APIs to support our customers with automations.

12:42 - We enable an automated resource deployments. We also automatically discover resource configurations and populate the configuration management database, which then underpins all of our ideal ITIL-compliant service management processes. Also we use APIs for alert detections and automatic ticketing and customer notifications. >> That’s pretty cool because that is another point where I can see you are adding value for the customers. Obviously they’ll come to you for latency networking reasons and data sovereignty, but you also help them with their modernization efforts.

13:26 - You help them modernizing their application from running first in traditional virtual machines, but still taking advantage of the Infrastructure as a Service platform built into Azure and Azure Stack Hub. Then, as you mentioned so nicely like all the PaaS services and containerized solutions, which then you can really start modernizing and taking advantage of that Cloud to experience doesn’t matter if it’s running in Azure itself or on your Azure Stack Hub solution. That is a pretty great solution. As well as you also mentioned the consistency again, like building the arm templates and building all that automation so they can use that. Now I really love what you’re really doing there for your customers. I know in effect that there is a lot of requests, especially also in Indonesia, for Azure services.

14:19 - If people now watch that video and they want to know more about you and learn more where should they go? >> Absolutely just go to our website, [inaudible] and you will find our contact details there and please come and talk to us. >> Thank you very much, John. Thank you very much Tibe. People who are watching you saw, you get the links into description. If you want to find out more, you find the links there and please reach out and talk to them they will be happy to talk to you. I want to say thank you also for watching and hopefully see you in the next one. >> Thank you. .