Optus joins Telstra in Cisco's hybrid cloud community

Optus is making significant in-roads into the IT services space – much like its arch-rival Telstra – announcing two major partnerships in the cloud space.

Optus has joined the Cisco Intercloud initiative, enabling customers to manage workloads across private and public clouds.

Intercloud is built on the OpenStack standard to allow workloads to move between different nodes at partner data centres; the vendor claims it can "support any workload, on any hypervisor and interoperate with any cloud".

Telstra was among the first Intercloud partners in the world, while others include Infront, Data#3, Dimension Data and Ethan Group.

Optus Business managing director John Paitaridis said the move allows Optus to provide best-of-breed networking services as a “single-service ICT provider”.

“Today’s announcement forms a part of our broader cloud and data centre strategy, with this being the first of several announcements Optus Business will make in the next few months,” he stated.

Last year Optus announced it would become the first carrier in Australia to offer a contact centre-as-a-service using Cisco's hosted collaboration technology.

Optus has also beaten Telstra to a place on the federal government’s new Cloud Services Panel, joining another new provider on the list, Empired. Telstra is still absent from the list, from which several big names were missing when the first two tranches were announced in February.

Others also making it onto the panel since the beginning of March include Cloud Central, CSXC Australia, Informed Solutions, Bulletproof Networks, Hitachi Data Systems Australia, Bang the Table, NTT Communications ICT Solutions and Veritec.

Optus will provide infrastructure-as-a-service (compute and storage) and software-as-a-service (managed Lync and unified communications as-a-service) on the panel.

Both Optus and Telstra have significantly expanded their footprints in IT service delivery. Optus entered the space through its 2005 buyout of Alphawest, then more recently acquired Microsoft partner Ensyst.

Telstra has acquired three systems integrators in the past two years: Bridge Point, O2 Networks and NSC Group.