Australian telecommunications company Telarus is pushingfurther into the New Zealand market, targeting SMEs and inking new deals withVector and CityLink.

Telarus CEO Jules Rumsey was in New Zealand recently to promote thecompany’s suite of managed services, as he anticipates deregulation will fuelstrong demand for alternatives to services offered by incumbent telcos Telecomand Telstra. Telarus’s latest customer acquisitions are fashion retailersCalvin Klein and Cue Clothing Company.

“Telarus does very well in the SME market so while we have acouple of New Zealand customers currently on board with 500-plus staff, ourarea of strength is in the 50-500 seat bracket,” he says. “We do have quite afew multi-nationals with branch offices in New Zealand, which was the initialdriver for entering the NZ market.”

Rumsey says the company’s focus has shifted from offeringjust voice and data, to offering a suite of managed services which leverage itstrans-Tasman MPLS network. These services include security, hosting and virtualservers. “We are heading in the same direction with voice, with the progressiveadoption of VoIP and will migrate our PSTN/ISDN voice clients to VoIP in time,”he says.

Telarus claim to offer dedicated capacity between Australiaand New Zealand that is up to five times cheaper than “other leading serviceproviders.” The company recently signed agreements to wholesale fibreconnections in Auckland and Wellington from Vector and CityLink respectively.In addition it has existing agreements with Telecom Wholesale to offer nationalcoverage with fixed line voice, ADSL, SHDSL and Ethernet services. Forinternational capacity it has a relationship with the Australian based Vocus.

Rumsey wouldn’t say how many clients it has inNew Zealand to date. “We prefer not to discuss client numbers as Telarus is aprivate company; we are also considering a couple of finance/fundraisingoptions so we’d like to keep our financial and customer numbers out of thepublic domain.”