Cisco's Chambers: Telstra deal a 'grand slam home run'

Cisco chief executive John Chambers has singled out Australia as being the most developed cloud country, and called its partnership with Telstra a "grand slam home run".

Chambers and Chuck Robbins, senior vice president, worldwide field operations, spoke to media at the Cisco Partner Summit in Montreal this week, and explained to CRN why Australia has been first cab off the rank for Cisco's cloud.

"Why Australia? Because Australia probably embraced the transition to cloud faster than any other country did, and Telstra was moving at the front end of that," said Robbins.

They also explained why Telstra had become the world's first partner for Cisco Intercloud.

Both Robbins and Chambers were involved in "very early discussions" with Telstra.

"Why we are working with Telstra, it is a matter of a long history of trust of working together. Our visions are very much aligned with where we are going," added Robbins.

"They were the first major service provider to align with our Intercloud strategy," said Chambers. "They helped us develop it, including saying, 'If you do this, you will need to change your culture, your organisational structure, even change your reward structure. Several people from my team said, 'Oh no', and Chuck and I said, 'Oh yes, we have to really make it happen.'

"Australia is much like Scandinavia and Canada; it is a very large geography with a very well educated population that is a sparsely populated. It is an ideal environment to do development in and to test in, with a country that is big enough to really make a difference but small enough that we can be really nimble," said Chambers.

"We couldn't be more pleased with where we are with Telstra, it's a grand slam home run," he added.

Chambers and Robbins were not alone in talking up Australia's fast adoption of cloud technology and move to recurring revenue models. Scott Brown, vice-president of the enterprise segment for Asia-Pacific and Japan, told CRN that Australia was "the canary in the coalmine" for cloud.

"The adoption of cloud services is the highest in the world. The penetration of capex to opex is the highest in the world. We are learning from Australia and trying to take that learning from Australia to the world," said Brown. "It was no accident that the first Intercloud node and provider was Telstra."

Nor is this first time Cisco has heaped praise on Australia for our cloud maturity.

Visiting Sydney last year, Cisco's president, development and sales, Rob Lloyd told CRN that Australia would be the "the Petri dish of the world" for Intercloud.

"Our Intercloud solution and ecosystem will probably be more vibrant in Australia than anywhere else in the world," said Lloyd. "It will be here first. It is going to be interesting to see it play out."

Steven Kiernan is a guest of Cisco in Montreal.