Australian telco Telstra has extended its Cisco Intercloud platform reach to include Hong Kong and Singapore. The platform was unveiled earlier this year and extends Telstra’s cloud capabilities to deliver Cisco’s cloud infrastructure to customers worldwide.

Cisco Cloud Services is an OpenStack based Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering, adding a public cloud offering to Telstra’s existing infrastructure capabilities in Australia, Asia and Europe.

Through the partnership with Cisco, development of the Cisco Intercloud is said to have progressed well in Australia with selected Telstra customers and partners now about to trial the service. The two companies said this will ultimately create more choice and flexibility for customers as they will have the ability to choose their future cloud environments.

Cisco SVP of global cloud sales and go-to-market Nick Earle said hybrid clouds are quickly becoming the new normal.

“We are extremely pleased that Telstra is already putting Cisco Cloud Services in the hands of Australian customers,” Earle said.

“With the expansion of Intercloud to Hong Kong and Singapore, Telstra’s leading the way in providing customers with an incredible choice of services across private and public clouds and the flexibility in how to consume them.”

Telstra executive director cloud Erez Yarkoni said “as we continue to expand our cloud services portfolio to a global footprint, at the core we are offering our customers choice and flexibility, making the transition to hybrid and public clouds simpler and easier to manage.”

“Our aim is to take the complexity out of connecting to the cloud,” Yarkoni said.