Cisco and Optus deploy 15 smart classrooms in AU$2.3m project
Optus Business has announced equipping 15 smart classrooms across regional Victoria as part of a AU$2.3 million project with South West TAFE using solutions from networking giant Cisco.
The Hamilton, Portland, and Warrnambool TAFE campuses have been updated with Cisco's collaboration and video-conferencing technology, including WebEx and Jabber, with the campuses' servers also being shifted onto a Cisco Meraki wireless network.
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Optus Business said the project, announced at Cisco Live in Melbourne, is part of its effort to digitise the education sector in an effort to boost the skills of students, aimed at regional areas where jobs are being lost to automation.
The upgrades will affect 5,000 students across the three campuses.
Earlier on Tuesday, Cisco and Optus Business announced that they will be focusing on three projects following their AU$12 million three-year co-investment last year: Vocational education and training programs; cloud orchestration; and smart campuses.
Optus Business and Cisco also launched a series of cloud, collaboration, and infrastructure technologies for the purposes of creating a "smart workplace" for government and enterprise customers.
Under the partnership, announced at Cisco Live in Melbourne on Tuesday, Optus will be integrating Cisco's Spark tool for collaboration, which can now be managed end to end by Optus Business through Optus' unified-communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) solution; and Cisco's Meraki cloud management system.
The two companies will also develop and implement a contact-centre-as-a-service solution, including an interactive voice response system; and a video-conferencing-as-a-service (VCaaS) solution for Optus Business to create a hosted video-conferencing bridge service for use with Cisco's Jabber software.
Optus last week also announced completing live trials of Cisco's Jasper narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) technology across its core network, with the wireless low-power wide-area network (LPWAN) trial seeing Cisco integrate Jasper, a cloud-based IoT platform, to support NB-IoT technology on Optus' 4G network.
Disclosure: Corinne Reichert travelled to Cisco Live in Melbourne as a guest of Cisco