Optus named Cisco's top Australian partner

Optus Business had a huge run at this year's Cisco Partner Summit, named best Australian partner among a swag of awards.

In the Asia-Pacific & Japan regional awards, Optus Business was ANZ Partner of the Year, as well as winning the APJ award for architectural excellence in collaboration.

Most impressively, Optus Business scored the top global award for architectural excellence in enterprise networks.

David Caspari, vice president of products and ICT at Optus, told CRN the awards were "testament to the 10-plus years we have been partnering with Cisco".

"We have literally hundreds of Cisco certified engineers in our organisation and the customer feedback is very positive."

Major Optus networking and IT projects in the past year included Energy Australia, Suncorp and ANZ Bank.

"We have built very strong capabilities around networking but also around key centres of excellence that sit on top of the networking environment, such as contact centre-as-service (CCaaS) and collaboration-as-service, and we take enterprises and government through that journey," said Caspari.

"When you start to put all of those together, it paints a picture as to why Cisco might think we are the best."

Optus recently become the first telco in Australia to launch Cisco UC-as-a-service.

In fact, Optus won a total of four awards at the Cisco's Montreal event this week, also taking home a Cisco 'Marketing Velocity" award as 'Revenue Marketer of the Year'.

Meanwhile, rival Telstra also won a global award at Cisco Partner Summit, winning the APJ award for architectural excellence in collaboration.

Steven Kiernan is a guest of Cisco in Montreal.