Aussie Broadband’s Growth and Cloud Strategy – SUSECON 2025

This is Techstrong tv. Hey everyone. We're back here at Techstrong tv and we're at scon in sunny Orlando.

What a great couple days it's been. We've met so many different people from suse, from their partners, from their customers, attendees. It's been a great time.

I hope you've enjoyed some of these videos. Let me introduce you next to Ben O’Shea. Ben is with a company called Aussie Broadband.

And Aussie Broadband was, is here as a SUSE customer partner. And they, uh, Ben was actually up on the keynote stage yesterday talking about some of the use cases they've been, uh, using, uh, or deploying with suse. But let's first welcome Ben.

Ben, welcome. It's great to have you here. Thank you.

Yeah, great to be here. Thanks for having me. Thank you.

So, Ben, before we jump in, you know, you are a rockstar on stage, but before we jump into that, you, our audience, a sense of, of who, you know, what you do and, and they may not know Aussie Broadband. Yeah. Um, and you know, about the company.

Yeah, Sure. So, uh, for me, uh, be Oche, I am general manager of transformation and cloud platform, uh, at Aussie Broadband. So, uh, my remit is looking after transformation of our technology function, so how we're starting to modernize our systems and our processes.

Uh, and also I have cloud platforms, which involves, uh, we have a customer facing cloud, uh, and also our internal cloud and hosting platforms, which is where suse obviously comes into the equation. Sure, sure, Sure. Yeah.

So let's talk about Ossie Broadband a little bit, though. You know, here in the US we hear Ossie brand broadband, we think, oh, it's an ISP. It is an we're We are an ISP.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you guys also are in the data center business. Yeah.

And, and, and the cloud business. Uh, yep. So yeah, Aussie Broadband, um, you know, we primarily are a residential internet services provider.

Uh, so that's our, our bread and butter and the biggest contributor of revenue, uh, to the business. Uh, you know, we are 21 years old now. Mm-hmm.

So, started out providing broadband services into regional, uh, places in Australia, um, where the bigger telcos like your Telstras and your offices, uh, didn't really want to touch because they didn't see the return on that investment. Uh, that was incredibly successful. Uh, and then with the launch of the National Broadband Network, uh, we built out connectivity into that infrastructure, uh, and, uh, are now a, a, a reseller of, of those services as well.

Yeah. So we had incredibly great success, uh, on the back of our exceptional customer service and our exceptional network, uh, in the residential broadband space, uh, which sort of gave us the ability to enter new markets. And we acquired a company called Over the Wire, which, uh, gave us capability in the enterprise and government market.

Uh, it gave us a cloud capability, uh, private cloud capability, and it also gave us a tier one voice network. Uh, we grew from, I think, 500 employees to about 1200 employees overnight. Yeah.

Uh, and then more recently we acquired a company, another voice company called Symbio, uh, which gave us another tier one voice network, and it gave us an international presence. Uh, so what A great story. Right.

But you, you know, you're operating private cloud out of data centers. Yes. Primarily in Australia.

Yeah. Do you over in, uh, uh, in New Zealand as well? Uh, Private cloud's mostly in Australia.

We've got a national, uh, private cloud that hosts, uh, enterprise and government type customers. Like A sovereign Yeah. Yeah.

It's all just happens to be an Australian based cloud. Yeah. Yeah.

So, got it. Yeah. For, for, for government.

Um, So you, and I've been talking to a bunch of people here. It's an interesting time for cloud and data center space, right? It, it's one of these convergence stories where, look, there are licensing changes coming, you know, from VMware that have people saying, Hey, maybe this is a time to go move to the cloud.

Yeah. Right. Re-architect my applications modernization.

There's, there's ai, there's, uh, quantum's a little further off, but, you know, there's so many different kind of catalysts for change right now that a lot of organizations are saying, Hey, maybe now's the time that we make a change, right? Yeah. Been through the covid, uh, pandemic and, you know, we, we need to digitize.

We did digitize, but we really need to finish that transformation. And I'm wondering how much of that is driving what you guys are seeing? Yeah, I Mean, we are going through that exact same, I guess, set of problems ourselves at the moment.

You know, an organization that has grown as rapidly as we have. We've got this, uh, you know, legacy of, of technology that we've acquired, right? Or we've, you know, built up, you know, in startup phase, we've done something to serve a particular need and we've done something else to serve a need.

And we've got essentially an amount of, you know, technology debt that we need to, to now consolidate, right? We've, it's grown us into a billion dollar company, but to set ourselves up for the next billion dollars of growth, we need to start thinking about, all right, well, how do we bring all of these disparate systems together? Uh, how do we, I guess, do that in a scalable, uh, efficient, cost effective manner?

And also, uh, you know, doing things at telco scale, uh, the hyperscaler becomes very, very quickly cost ineffective. So what is the cloud hosting platform that we are gonna have that we host all of those workloads internally on? And that's again, where, you know, the, the, the cloud platform project that I've been talking about while I'm here, uh, and the CA solution comes into play.

So, you know, building that, um, that national infrastructure for our internal use cases, providing hyperscaler like features and functionality for our internal customers, our software development teams to consume, you know, in the same way that they would, you know, if they were building in AWS or Azure. Uh, but in our data centers, uh, backed by certified validated solutions from suse, uh, and our other key partners, uh, that give us, I guess a sense of, um, security. And with that, we, we are to meet our compliance obligations, uh, and deliver those services cost effecti.

That's why I think Yeah. It's about resting your head on the pillow sleeping a little easier, right? It's this stability Yeah.

That, that comes with that. It's interesting. It's almost like eating your own dog food kind of story, right?

Because what you're, what you're asking your customers to do, you do it yourself, yourselves. Yeah. Right?

And, and that's an important kind of thing that people want to hear, right? Don't, don't just sell me a solution. What, what are you doing?

Yeah. Well, we're doing the same thing. Amazon started AWS saying, Hey, if you want Amazon infrastructure Yeah.

Use AWS. Right? And, and that's where that came from.

Yeah. I Mean, there's a lot to be said for an approach like that. Like often, you know, you are your best reference customer.

Absolutely. If you, if it's good enough for you, you know, if Mikey likes it, everyone likes it, as they say on that commercial. Anyway, you were, you were up on the keynote stage, Jess.

Today, most people watching this, unfortunately we're not here. Okay. So give them a, a flavor of what you, you spoke about.

Yeah. So, uh, again, we've touched on it a little bit already. So just talking about obviously the digital transformation that we are going through, uh, internally.

So, you know, we have a number of, um, different, uh, cloud hosting stacks. We have a number of different operational support stacks. We have a number of different business support stacks and systems of record for things like customer, uh, and service.

And those all come from the different companies that we've acquired, plus what we sort of had originally for ourselves. And, you know, we've got two paths that we can go down. We can either continue to maintain these bespoke systems or, and, and integrate them and try and, you know, smash you know, the records from one to, to talk to the other together.

Or we can sort of go, all right, now's the time to, you know, think about what does, uh, a single consolidated set of of O-S-S-B-S-S, uh, and cloud hosting platforms, uh, look like. So those are, I guess the, the three prongs of our digital transformation strategies to build common core platforms across those, those three domains. Yep.

Now you guys partner with suse Yeah. Customer as well though. And, um, you know, a lot of people out watching this, and I hope we've educated them over the last couple of videos.

It's more than just running their Linux. You want to do cloud native, you wanna do observability, cloud native Security, you know, it, it is a, it's a platform. Yeah.

Right? Suse presents a platform, but it's, yet it's open. Yeah.

It's, I I think that's another big thing that companies like Aussi Broadband need to, are worried about, which is, I don't want to be locked in. No, we don't. And it's, it's, it's the balance.

And we've, you know, been talking about this a fair bit, you know, over the last couple of days, uh, as we've been taking different meetings, you know, with Susa and, and other partners is, you know, what's the, what's the right amount of choice? You know, there are, you know, the incredibly, uh, closed, um, more commercial type, you know, you must do it this way. And you know, you get the feature when we say you get the feature, which is, you know, I mean, that's, that's good for some people, but it's, it's not, it's not, it's not where we are.

It's not what we need. Uh, but there's also the, you know, the other end of the spectrum where, you know, you can go and piece together everything yourself, but I guess you then take on all of the, the risk around responsibility. Yeah, Yeah.

Maintain it. You run the risk of, you know, um, perhaps one of the, the projects stalling and no longer becoming maintained. And then you've gotta work out how to, you know, make, keep the environment current.

Right? So It is one of the problems with open source, right? If you put two of your two your eggs in that basket, you better Nah.

Be sure you have some say, or at least you have some visibility. Yeah. It's one of the nice things about using like cloud native infrastructure from CNCF, you know, that you've got the Linux Foundation behind it.

That's right. They've got 200 projects and so forth. But you're right.

From a, a company like, you know, Aussie broadband, you, you've gotta kind of steer the middle there. You don't want to be Yeah. Far one way or the other.

That's Right. We want to have, you know, an amount of choice and flexibility, but we also want, uh, an amount of someone going, Hey, I know these components work together and I will guarantee you that they will continue to work together for a long time. And you can take that, you know, to the board and you can, you know, tick that off on your risk register.

Uh, and it's like I say, putting your head on that pillow. Yeah, that's right. And sleeping soundly.

Yeah. And, and you know, at the end of the day, you know, we're, we're a telco, right? We are in the business of providing, you know, telco and ISP services to our customer.

Uh, we want our internal infrastructure to just hum. Right? So, Agreed.

Yeah. Agreed. Yeah.

Hey, Ben, I want to thank you for coming on here. For people who wanna find out more about Aussie broadband, maybe even some folks down under watching this. Yeah.

What's the website? com au. And, uh, I love it.

Yeah. Thank you so much, Ben. Thank you so much.

Thanks for having Me. No, no. Shay Aussie broadband.

Keith SA partner customer here at Scon. Hey, don't go anywhere. We've got a lot more videos that we've been doing here in Orlando, so stay tuned.