Telstra goes to the cloud for unified comms

Telstra has announced a new set of voice, video, telepresence, and mobile applications — known as Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) — in partnership with network vendor giant Cisco.

The product, called Cloud Collaboration, will be on offer to business, enterprise, and government customers, and will be hosted locally in Telstra's datacentres in Australia, with services delivered over Telstra's Next IP network and Next G mobile network.

The product can be sold on a monthly basis, varied on the number of workers actually using it at the time. Workers also have categories ranging from essential to office to information to mobile, to allow Telstra to determine how that worker's traffic should be prioritised over the network.

Telstra's group managing director of enterprise and government Paul Geason said that the product would cut the cost of investing in infrastructure for unified communications.

"By taking unified communications to the cloud, we are removing the burden of capital expenditure and complicated deployments from customers. The cloud model takes organisations to an operating expenditure model, allowing simpler budgeting and greater flexibility in their IT services," he said in a statement.

Cisco's Australia and New Zealand vice president, Richard Kitts, said that Telstra's product is one of the largest on offer on Cisco's unified cloud computing platform in the world.

"Cisco Unified Communications and TelePresence are the first of many new services we expect to bring to market with Telstra in the future," Kitts said.

The product will be available in the next few months, but Telstra will set up demonstration units in the Telstra Experience Centres in Melbourne and Sydney.