Telstra today announced to invest more than US$800 million in cloud computing over the next five years to support the growing demand from Australian organizations for cloud services.    

As part of the announcement, Telstra CEO David Thodey unveiled more corporate customers who use Telstra cloud computing including Australian Vintage, The Salvation Army Employment Plus, Oz Minerals, Tabcorp, and Tristar Medical Group.

"Sales of our T-Suite Software-as-a-Service have grown threefold for the past year and use of our infrastructure cloud has increased by nearly 50% this year," Thodey said.

"We are also experiencing strong sales in our cloud voice and video services, which are exceeding 80% per year and we now manage more than 100,000 IP telephony services delivered from the cloud," Thodey said.

The Salvation Army Employment Plus General Manager Business Administration, Howard Morey said the organization moved to a cloud computing solution from Telstra.

"We found buying our own equipment, managing it and looking after the operating system took resources away from matching people to jobs. We didn't want to try to find massive amounts of capital to run IT; we saw that as the old way of doing business. We wanted to be out working with employers and finding people jobs," Morey said.

Australian Vintage's CIO, Josh Gibbons explains the company's selection for Telstra's cloud computing service: "Telstra's locally-based cloud infrastructure gives us the flexibility and scalability that we need, while removing the burden of managing the deployment and on-going administration of our own IT resources," Gibbons said.

The US$800 million+ expenditure will be within the company's 14% capital expenditure to sales ratio and will include:

Telstra has partnered with cloud technology vendors including Cisco, VMware, Microsoft and market partner Accenture.