Stuart Corner
Thursday, 06 November 2008 11:22
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 2
Telstra this week announced alliances with both Microsoft and Cisco to deliver, amongst other things, unified communications services to enterprise customers.
The CEOs of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, and of Cisco, John Chambers, last year famously held a joint press conference at which the
pledged to co-operate because they have so many large customers in common around the world, while at the same time vowing to compete fiercely.
This interesting juggling act came to Australia this week with the two CEOs on hand (the one virtually and the other in the flesh) at Telstra's annual investor day session of presentations for the launch by Telstra of separate alliances both pledging to deliver their respective unified communications and collaboration services to business customers.
Telstra and Microsoft had held a joint press conference the day before to
flesh out details of their alliance, but details of the Cisco/Telstra alliance remain scant.
Telstra CEO, Sol Trujillo, said: "We are integrating Cisco's unified communications and collaboration and managed network service solutions into Telstra's world-class networks to provide our customers with the tools they need to innovate and thrive in the global marketplace."
Of the Telstra Microsoft Alliance Holly Kramer, Telstra's group managing director, product management said: "This is true unified communications - a combination of telephony, email, mobility, conferencing, collaboration and tools like presence."
Specifically the unified communication part of this will be integration between Telstra's hosted IP telephony service and the UC functionality of Microsoft Office Communications Server; the collaboration component Microsoft SharePoint offered under a software as a service model.
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