Telstra begins business billing migration

Telstra said today that it would begin migrating business customers to its new billing system this month.

Telstra CEO Sol Trujillo
(Credit: Telstra)

The migration is part of a five-year transformation program which has seen Telstra cut down the number of its internal IT platforms to reduce complexity and cut costs.

Up until now, the company has migrated 3.3 million of its consumers to the new billing system, short of the number it wanted.

"To be quite frank, we did not achieve our ambitious target of five million customers migrated before the end of June," Telstra CEO Sol Trujillo admitted at the company's results briefing today for the year to 30 June 2008.

He said, however, that this number would be achieved by the end of September and that the end of the year would see seven million crossed over.

The migration of business customers, however, will take longer, with the crossover expected to carry on into the new year, he said.

But Trujillo brushed aside the delay. "The code is deployed and running at scale ... all without breaking," he said. "The most important thing when you are doing a migration from legacy platforms to new platforms is that the new code works."

Despite having to foot the bill for keeping three systems running, the legacy, the new and a transition system, Trujillo insisted that the company's earnings would not be negatively affected by the delay.