Online real estate giant REA Group has migrated its in-house staff email system to Telstra’s T-Suite platform, purchasing 750 Exchange Online accounts in what Telstra said was its biggest T-Suite cloud computing deal so far.

“The deal is the largest since T-Suite was launched in April 2009 and links REA Group staff across four countries — Australia, Italy, Luxembourg and Hong Kong,” said a Telstra statement issued late yesterday.

REA Group chief information officer Daniel Oertli said that moving infrastructure into the cloud was consistent with REA’s strategy of focusing on the competitive edge. “We were running an outmoded corporate email system,” he said. “Taking advantage of the resilience, cost efficiencies and managed convenience offered by Microsoft Exchange Online through T-Suite made much more sense.”

Oertli was not immediately available to comment on what system REA Group was using previously but it’s understood the company was at least partially using a self-hosted version of Exchange.

REA operates the realestate.com.au family of websites which also includes sites overseas — globally the company’s properties pull in some 6.8 million unique browsers each month (based on August traffic).

The news comes as Australian organisations are increasingly switching to cloud email platforms and dumping internally hosted offerings such as Lotus Notes and self-hosted Exchange.

Coca-Cola Amatil, for example, is halfway through the massive task of migrating its over 8,000 employees off Notes and onto Microsoft’s hosted Business Productivity Online Suite, and AMP is doing the same.

Some organisations — especially in the education sector — have picked Google’s rival GMail solution, but Google has not won many large-scale implementations of the technology in Australia compared to Microsoft. One of GMail’s high-profile case studies is AAPT, which recently migrated all of its internal staff to Gmail after a limited trial.

Image credit: Grzesiek Hidden, royalty free

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