Telstra and Cisco strike partnership

Yesterday, the CEOs of Cisco and Telstra got together via telepresence to announce a partnership which will see them develop products for Australian business.

Telstra's David Thodey and Sol Trujillo talk to Cisco's John Chambers
(Credit: Telstra)

Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers had been hoping to come to Australia to cement the partnership at the Telstra investor day yesterday as Microsoft's Steve Ballmer had for the recent Microsoft-Telstra agreement, but Chambers had other commitments.

"He's busy announcing his results," Telstra CEO Sol Trujillo told media and analysts at the investor day. Yet all was not lost, as Chambers came virtually using his company's Telepresence 1000. "For some reason we're able to make him magically appear in hi-def," Trujillo joked.

Chambers said that Trujillo and he shared a "one word, one click" vision to make communications networks and devices easy to use. The partnership between the two companies will see the integration of Cisco's telepresence systems and managed network services into Telstra's networks with, according to Telstra, exclusive products for the Australian telco on the way.

"Sol's probably been the most direct out of any of the service providers in the world about making these capabilities easy," Chambers said. "Our engineers love to engineer too many functions in, which is a nice way of saying it's too complex for the users."