Telstra Cloud computing general manager, Mark Pratley, said that the certification came as a result of sessions it held earlier this year with 160 enterprise customers, such as heavy machinery manufacturer Komatsu, to establish what they wanted included in the Cloud services model.

"The customers wanted to have confidence in being able to shift their enterprise work loads into an environment they could trust," he said. "It means they can run their SAP applications out of Telstra's Cloud and these should operate at optimum performance. SAP is also used by the majority of our customers so it made sense to gain certification."

The bid to work more closely with SAP was also part of . The telco has partnered with Cisco, VMware and Microsoft, while integration partner Accenture will build the next phase of its integrated Cloud platform.

Pratley said customers interested in using the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and software as a service (SaaS) offerings were looking for savings in hardware and operating costs.

"Some customers are running human resources modules and back-end customer relationship management [CRM] paths. Our Cloud platform is certified to run SAP's entire enterprise suite."