CEOs of Microsoft and Cisco drop in to back Telstra

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 06 November 2008 10:22

Opinion and Analysis

The unified communications component of the Cisco-Telstra alliance was not spelt out. The collaboration component is almost certainly based around the WebEx offering, acquired by Cisco last year.

Telstra did announce that it would be expanding its offering of the Cisco TelePresence high resolution videoconferencing technology as a managed service to enable conferences to be set up between the managed telepresence networks of different companies: a feature likely to prove very popular,

Telstra also announced that would release "additional and unique managed network capabilities such as WAN optimisation services and end-to-end managed applications and security services," but without giving any details.

To complicate the picture even further, the day before Telstraa announced its Microsoft alliance, Telstra 'soft launched' is SaaS offering, T-Suite.

Two of the initial offerings are Microsoft's collaboration software, SharePoint and its hosted email service Exchange. But there are also security applications - McAfee anti-spam, anti-virus, firewall etc and MessageLabs email security - which could be alternatives to those that will be offered through the Cisco alliance.

None of these three initiatives is yet a full blown commercial service: the Microsoft and Cisco alliances are months away from this. But it is clear that, by forming strong partnerships with two of  leading vendors in the enterprise IT, networking and office communications markets Telstra is positioning itself to be a dominant player in the delivery of services 'from the cloud' in the future.

It's all part of Telstra's strategy to extract more revenue from its Next IP network by increasing the range of value-added services it delivers over that network to enterprise customers.