World first

This is the first relationship of its kind between Microsoft and a telco anywhere in the world, and Ms Bendschneider said it followed work over a number of years in Telstra building up its expertise in partnering with Microsoft.

This has already included the acquisition of Melbourne-based developer, IT consultancy and Microsoft partner Readify and the $40 million buyout of cloud migration services business Kloud in 2016.

Telstra will sell the calling service as a standalone offering, giving it a much-needed new revenue stream and Ms Bendschneider described it as one of the company's most significant product launches this year.

It will sit under its Network Applications and Services category, which incorporates security, managed network services and cloud as well as enterprise collaboration tools.

Telstra chief executive Andy Penn has previously spoken of the plan to become a significant player in the global tech industry. Louise Kennerley

"Launching a product like this caters for, not just the large enterprises, but more importantly the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Australian organisations that will need to re-plumb and rewire their communications and collaborations environment ahead of a number of things changing in the market like the NBN," she said.

Tech rivalry


"Our industry is in transition ... but with disruption comes opportunity and that's the mindset we have. We're going after opportunity that is close to the core of the business we know and understand deeply, but also embraces technology that is close to the type of business that we know how to serve really, really well."

Microsoft Australia's chief operating officer Rachel Bondi said the new product was testament to a strong partnership that had been fostered with Telstra over a number of years. Late last week Microsoft announced that 200,000 organisations had begun using Teams, since it was launched in late 2016, up from 125,000 six months ago.

While rivals like Slack offer voice and video calls to other users within the app, the Telstra partnership means Microsoft is getting ahead in adding traditional phone calls to its software suite.

"This is a unique offering in the Australian marketplace. We have Microsoft Office calling and hybrid solutions in other markets, but this is co-created for Microsoft and Telstra only in Australia," Ms Bondi said.

"We do know that people want to see this unification of their collaboration experience, so whether it be their voice and phone experience or whether it be their workplace, their project management, and all the messaging apps, we can now offer it under one client experience of Office 365, so that is where we're really going to see momentum come from."