SYDNEY, Australia - April 26, 2007 - Telstra, Australia's leading telecommunications and information services company, has purchased and installed four Cisco® TelePresence Meeting Solution systems to improve productivity and collaboration between its key Melbourne and Sydney offices.
Telstra is Cisco's first Australian customer for TelePresence, which was unveiled in late October 2006 as a ground breaking new category of products that create live "face-to-face" meeting experiences using high definition video and spatial audio over an Internet Protocol (IP) network.
Telstra chief executive officer, Sol Trujillo, said: "Telstra is constantly seeking new ways to improve the way we communicate internally and with our customers, partners and shareholders. Working with Cisco, we are actively embracing TelePresence. TelePresence will help Telstra drive productivity and enable our senior management to collaborate as if in the same room, despite being more than thousands of kilometers apart. We believe this is a great example of the kinds of benefits which are available using IP, and it will no doubt also help us reduce travelling costs."Telstra has deployed two of the Cisco TelePresence System (CTS) 3000's in Melbourne, and two in Sydney. The CTS 3000 systems each comprise a three-panel 65-inch plasma screen system complete with a specially designed table that seats six participants on one side, or a "virtual table" for twelve. It supports life-size images, ultra-high-definition video (720p and 1080p), as well as spatial audio capabilities. The Cisco TelePresence System 3000 also includes codecs, cameras, a lighting array, microphones, and speakers, all of which have been specially tuned to optimize the experience.
Using the technology, Telstra executives will be able to communicate with each other from Sydney to Melbourne as if they were meeting in the same room, improving collaboration, sharing documents more efficiently, improving productivity, and reducing travel costs.
Ross Fowler, Cisco Australia and New Zealand managing director, said: "There is no doubt that there are significant productivity, cost saving and, indeed, environmental benefits available to organizations which choose to deploy sophisticated, Internet Protocol-based communications solutions such as TelePresence. Telstra is clearly a leader in this area, and we believe Telstra will benefit from being able to use TelePresence to take its internal communication to another level and embrace the human network."
The Cisco TelePresence Meeting solution is an integral component within Cisco's Service-Oriented Network Architecture (SONA). This architectural framework helps enterprises evolve their existing communications infrastructure into an intelligent information network. Working within the SONA framework, Cisco offers real-time collaborative applications such as voice and video that feature quality-of-service, security and high availability and operate on a single integrated network.
