Anittel wins second hosted Cisco UC deal

Beats out Telstra again to sign Tas Govt.

Anittel has won a $17 million deal with the Tasmanian Government for managed voice services, in the company’s second win for its new hosted Cisco US service.

The tender win was announced this morning, after the systems integrator entered a trading halt late yesterday afternoon pending the announcement.

Anittel will provide managed voice services through its recently-released hosted Cisco unified communications infrastructure across all of the Tasmanian Government's agencies. The 5 year contract has three 3-year options to renew, with a maximum value of $45 million.

The deal is based around the Cisco UC Call Manager platform and will include the provision of servers, routers, switches and handsets.

The Tasmanian Government put out a tender late last year to replace its current Telstra Spectrum endpoints, which will be decommissioned in 2014 as they come to end of life.

The Tasmanian Government deal marks the second time Anittel has beaten out Telstra with its hosted Cisco offering.

“One of the biggest things that I’ve pushed is that fact that you’ve got to be located in regional areas to be able to deliver, and a lot of our competitors are not,” Anittel CEO Peter Kazacos told CRN. 

Anittel will add hosted Cisco nodes in Tasmania to its infrastructure as part of the deal. Kazacos said the infrastructure being built in Tasmania meant the Cisco solution would become available to more customers, specifically SMBs, on the island state.

“Our view is that the expertise and understanding we gain here - what we’re competing against and what it takes to win - we will leverage in other locations,” Kazacos said.

“And having the infrastructure here will make it available to any other business, not just government, ensuring our SMB customers also have a platform they can use going forward.”

Anittel will move additional resources and staff into Tasmania to service the deal. Kazacos declined to comment on the scale of the resources due to commercial sensitivity.

Launched in June, the hosted service wooed a handful of soft-release customers including regional employment organisation Joblink Plus, in a three-year “multi-million” dollar deal to roll the solution out to its 300 users and 37 regional offices across NSW.

Anittel earlier this year announced plans to upgrade equipment in each of its 12 national points of interconnect. It will spend $2.5 million on new Cisco routers and $1 million on new fibre leasing arrangements.