Sourcing success: powering global growth through colocation

As one of the world’s leading procurement software providers, this company had built a fast-growing business that helps hundreds of enterprises streamline sourcing, supplier and contract management, and payment processes.

But this success came at a price. As the business grew, so did the demands on its technology backbone and the costs of running it.

Its cloud-based architecture, built entirely on AWS, was becoming increasingly expensive to operate, where spending on cloud services had climbed to between $1 million and $2 million a year and continued to rise rapidly. Cloud costs often escalate as organisations scale, driven by factors such as rapid growth and complexity in applications, increased compute usage, expenses associated with data transfer and egress charges, and even lack of expertise. While rising costs are expected as a business grows, if unchecked, they can ultimately hinder sustainable growth and competitiveness.

As the company prepared to expand into four new geographies, it faced a hard truth: The economics of its current cloud model would not support its global ambitions. Each new market would add cost and complexity, creating additional pressure on margins.

Its business and technology leadership team had a choice to make: Keep absorbing the rising costs of the cloud model or rethink their architecture.

From Cloud-first to Cloud-smart

As the company’s leadership team evaluated their options, a few constraints came into focus. The first was the need for hands-on technical expertise in their new markets to manage installation, configuration, and ongoing operations; capabilities they did not have in place.

Second, they needed an architecture that could remain manageable even as it scaled. Expanding into multiple regions meant more infrastructure, more networks, and more moving parts. This could quickly add layers of complexity, which calls for a partner capable of delivering both compute and connectivity seamlessly.

The third was traditional data centre providers could not deliver the end-to-end support the company required.

That’s when the company turned to Telstra International.

After careful assessment, the team here at Telstra International proposed a colocation-based hybrid cloud strategy. This future-ready approach would give the company a way to control costs, simplify management, and drive international growth without losing the agility of the cloud.

This approach reflects our proven expertise in designing hybrid-cloud and interconnect solutions for some of the world’s leading organisations. For example, it supported a global semiconductor leader in establishing new data centres in Asia and Europe, leveraging the colocation and connectivity capabilities of Telstra International and its partners.

Similarly, Telstra International helped a quantitative research and technology firm ensure secure, low-latency collaboration across its markets by interconnecting its sites within Asia and in Europe through high-performance Ethernet Private Line services.

Telstra International’s experts migrated workloads from AWS to on-premises data centres in the four new geographies, taking advantage of Telstra’s global network of secure and sustainable data centre and colocation facilities.

To streamline operations, Telstra International bundled competitively priced connectivity services with its colocation solution that gave rise to a single management framework that lowered complexity and total cost of ownership. Its network specialists provided expert consultancy on inter-cabling design, rack installation, and architectural design while applying best practices throughout the deployment.

Telstra International also ensured all required security certifications and compliance documentation were in order and implemented a dual-layer protection model that safeguarded workloads end-to-end and strengthened governance.