Cisco HCS offers highly secure collaboration solutions for public, private and hybrid clouds from partners delivering Cisco Powered cloud services. Telkom customers in South Africa will experience the flexibility of cloud-based collaboration and will be able to deploy applications more quickly to deliver greater collaboration productivity.
"As more devices and people in South Africa are connected on the network, service providers such as us will need to continue to innovate, diversify and transform to meet the demands of our customers," says Johann Henning, MD of Telkom Business.
"The company has an established, longstanding strategic partnership with Cisco and we are delighted to be expanding our portfolio with HCS, which takes our product offering into the collaboration market for the first time. We will start by providing HCS to our customers in South Africa but we do have plans to roll it out eventually through our partner network to other countries in Africa where we have coverage. Our strategic collaboration is designed to achieve this goal as well as help provide our growing portfolio of customers the latest technology solutions which will serve their ever-changing needs."
Whereas historically organisations shied away from hosted services due to a perceived lack of security and control, Cisco HCS will provide Telkom customers with carrier-grade security and manageability and more. It offers collaborative technologies delivered as highly secure and reliable cloud services, which include voice and video as a service; instant messaging and presence as a service, web conferencing as a service; and mobility as a service.
Alpheus Mangale, MD for Cisco in South Africa says: "The company's key objective is to work with leading service providers to help them to focus on greater innovation in order to take full advantage of the growth opportunities with the telecoms sector in South Africa and the African continent as a whole. Our shared goal has always been to serve customers better and help to continue to build profitable businesses. As the needs of its customers change, Telkom will be able to expand its capabilities accordingly to stay ahead in an environment of increasing competition."
