Australian telco Telstra announced Tuesday that the company is partnering with Cisco on a deal that will effectively see Telstra become the first service provider to deploy Cisco’s global cloud compute infrastructure within its datacentres. Telstra also announced it will also invest in Cisco Evolved Services Platform for its networking infrastructure in a bid to improve service personalisation.

Telstra said standardising on Cisco’s cloud will enable its customers to better manage applications across hybrid cloud environments, as well as orchestrate compute, network and storage resources.

Cisco will effectively install and operate a node within one of Telstra’s local Australian datacentres, the first of Cisco’s partners to work with the networking giant through its global cloud programme.

The move could be the start of a trend that sees Cisco become more entrenched in operators’ business, moving out of its core role of providing routers, servers and switches, to both selling and handling the management of the infrastructure – something more akin to how companies like Ericsson operate in the telco space.

“Our customers will now have the choice of cloud infrastructure from global leaders, allowing them to select the cloud service to meet their requirements and scale network and cloud resources to deliver service agility, security and performance,” said Erez Yarkoni, global enterprise & services, executive director, Cloud at Telstra.

Yarkoni explained that the deal is focused on enabling application delivery, where Telstra said it can offer value.

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“Applications are critical to delivering business value and we believe we can offer our customers a differentiated solution for managing their applications across clouds,” he said.

“The Cisco relationship allows us to offer deeper and broader service capabilities to help our customers manage their critical applications, making the transition to the cloud simpler and more cost effective.”

Telstra also announced that it will invest in the development of the Cisco Evolved Services Platform (CESP), which combines software defined networking and network function virtualisation with advanced orchestration capabilities. CESP is intended to help service providers deploy more personalised cloud services to customers.

Commenting on the recent announcement Rob Lloyd, President, development and sales at Cisco said: “Cisco is honoured to expand its longstanding partnership with Telstra to deliver global cloud services that uniquely address customer requirements in a world of hybrid clouds.”

“This first of a kind deployment, which recognizes the value to customers of an open, application centric approach to hybrid cloud, reinforces Telstra’s position as an innovative and pioneering leader in the global service provider industry,” he added.

Last year Cisco took deep strides into the telco world through a host of acquisitions, including LTE small-cell specialist Ubiquisys, policy management solutions firm BroadHop, SON software provider Intucell and start up datacentre and cloud solutions provider Insieme Networks.

“Cisco’s heritage is in IP and data communications, and as the networks begin to look more like regular IP networks, it starts playing more and more to Cisco’s hands,” said Daryl Schoolar, Ovum’s principal analyst covering the wireless infrastructure space at the research firm at the time.

This article originally appeared on Business Cloud News