Meet the CRN MVPs: Telstra

Telstra is a unique beast. More than any other company in Australia, it straddles every tier of the channel. It's one of the biggest customers for technology as well as one of the biggest vendors of telecommunications services.

Over the past few years, it has been ratcheting up its IT business through acquisitions of all sorts of IT outfits, from digital media companies to giant telco and data centre giant PacNet, to garden variety resellers such as NSC Group, Bridge Point and O2 Networks.

Another part of its growing portfolio is a burgeoning cloud platform spanning infrastructure-as-a-service from the likes of Cisco, VMware and IBM, as well as SaaS through its newly rebranded Apps Marketplace, via which Telstra resells Box, Symantec and, of course, Office 365, among others.

While Telstra has long had a major dealer network, the telco is now building out its own channel of IT resellers. In the same year, Telstra was named Cisco's Cloud Partner of the Year at Cisco Live, while the telco then awarded Melbourne resellers Jasco and Byte at its own partner conference. How very meta.

MVP vendor partnerships

• Cisco Gold Certified Partner
• HP Platinum/Gold
• Intel Security Platinum
• Microsoft Gold
• VMware Premier

Notes on methodology

The CRN MVP program recognises Australia's top IT providers by measuring their value and versatility based on third-party vendor accreditations across 12 eligible vendors: Amazon Web Services, Cisco, Citrix Systems, Dell, EMC, HP (incl Aruba), IBM, Intel (incl McAfee), Lenovo, Microsoft, Symantec and VMware. 

Only eligible vendors listed above. Only Gold-equivalent partner levels are included. CRN MVP companies may have accreditations with other, ineligible vendor programs or lower-level accreditations with eligible vendors (for example, we do not list silver accreditations). 

We expect the list of eligible vendors to change in coming years, which may open up the CRN MVP program to new entrants.

For further information on the CRN MVP program, see this article.

We are currently accepting expressions of interest for the 2016 CRN MVPs at www.techpartner.news/MVP. Entries will open in coming months.