Telus Consultants Program Highlights

Yesterday I attended a day-long session held by Telus, which they do on occasion for the consultant community. It's one way they do outreach, and in this case, the focus was an update on some of their key partner relationships. The day was split up with presentations from Intel, Nortel and Microsoft, with a lot of focus how well they're partnering with Telus to bring innovation and value to the Canadian market.

The audience is largely technical and IT consultants, so most of the messaging was about speeds and feeds, as opposed to business and strategy issues, which is more my cup of tea. I was really the only industry analyst there, so I didn't have any expectations otherwise. That's fine - was still pretty interesting, and it's clear that Telus is thinking more like a Telco 2.0 carrier than 1.0 carrier, although this may take time to percolate down to the masses.

Even though Microsoft and Nortel have a strategic alliance going, they each did their own thing yesterday, so there wasn't any indication of joint solutions coming with Telus. However, Nortel did have some nice SMB solutions on display, and I got a good demo at their table. To be fair, I couldn't stay til the very end, but I didn't see any evidence of cross-vendor synergies finding their way into Telus' portfolio. Not to say this couldn't happen, but these were for the most part serial presentations, and if I had to do it over, I'd look for Telus to talk more about the collective benefits these partnerships are bringing, as well as how they are helping create some distinct integrated solutions that customers can't get anywhere else.

As an aside, much of the banter between the presentations was about the major news that hit the media that morning about new regulations to open up the wireless market here. It's a big story, and in some ways it overshadowed what was going on in the sessions. None of the speakers made any reference to it, and given that Telus is one of Canada's 3 major wireless players, I think this could have led to some interesting discussions.

Here are some photos, courtesy of my Nokia N95....




Comments from Bill Edwards, who leads the Telus Consultants Liaison Program





An Intel blade server - or is it? Sure looks like one, but it's actually a cardboard life-size version they passed around so we could get a sense of its footprint. Pretty fun prop...




FMC demo from Nortel


Microsoft - nothing to really show, but here's a cool image off their monitor



Technorati tags: Telus, Jon Arnold, Intel, Nortel, Microsoft