Cisco and NBN Co collaboration designed to enhance opportunities for many Small to Medium Businesses in Australia

5 March 2019 | Cisco and NBN Co today announced a collaboration designed to drive and accelerate the capability for many Small to Medium Businesses (SMB) to connect to business nbn , and access technology solutions that could help to support their digital transformation.

This forms the first investment announcement as part of Cisco’s Country Digital Acceleration (CDA) program announced last week, aimed at helping to drive Australia’s inclusive economic growth.

“Small business plays a crucial role as the backbone of our Australian economy and represents a fast growing IT market. We’re not just helping to connect eligible SMB’s to business nbn , we are helping to transform SMBs digitally whilst connecting, simply and more securely,” said Ken Boal, Vice President of Cisco Australia and New Zealand.

There are now more than half a million businesses connected to the nbn access network and connecting at a rate of around 20,000 new businesses each month. This represents a huge opportunity for many businesses to benefit from the collaboration.

Many Australian SMB’s will be faced with a disconnection reality, and with business nbn now being widely available across NBN Co’s fixed line network, the opportunity is to ensure that an eligible small business who might be on a consumer grade connection, can connect to a retail plan.

“With almost three in four businesses now able to connect to the nbn access network there is an enormous opportunity to educate the market. We encourage businesses to speak to their providers to see if tapping in to the network with business nbn could help them streamline operations, leverage state-of-the-art applications and potentially increase their bottom line.” Said Stephen Rue, Chief Executive Officer of NBN Co.

“We have focused our efforts on building a wholesale product and service suite that service providers can tailor to deliver for the needs of Australian businesses. This includes high and symmetrical download and upload speeds designed to support critical video and data applications, optimised voice services and optional premium service levels to support retailers to keep businesses up and running.

“We look forward to working with Cisco to provide support for their business customers migrating to the nbn access network and help them to leverage transformative solutions to grow their operations.”

SMBs should speak to their provider about how business nbn services can potentially enable new capability, for example:

– Transform the SMB’s customer experience and adoption of technology to help SMB’s communicate and collaborate with their customers.

– Productive and effective decision making, greater flexibility and cost savings.

– Access applications faster, moving to and from the Cloud.

– New innovation capability and scale to global markets.

This CDA investment will be focused on educating and building awareness with SMB’s around the opportunity to more securely connect and access business and enterprise grade technology that Retail Service Providers (RSP) or ICT Channel Partners can bundle and deliver to the market. In addition, there will be joint go-to-market and digital marketing activities to help share how SMB’s can potentially digitally transform their business leveraging business grade services from nbn .

The aim is to provide support for eligible business customers migrating to the nbn fixed-line access network and to educate SMBs on the potential opportunity presented by fast broadband, leveraging transformative solutions.

Ken Boal continues, “Digitally enabling the Small Business workforce is imperative for Australia to grow and be more competitive. Our far-reaching partner ecosystem provides education, advice, services and solutions that eligible businesses need as they transition to the nbn access network.

There are clear opportunities for RSP’s and ICT Channel partners to build offers and digital solutions for eligible SMBs which can be bundled with nbn services and help them realise the potential of digital enablement.”

-ENDS-

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Originally Posted at: https://apjc.thecisconetwork.com/site/content/lang/en/id/10220