Telstra's managing director of procurement Ian Wheatley told Computerworld the drivers for the device consolidation project included dealing with multiple brands of equipment, and the high costs resulting from a lack of order in their installation and management.

"We had a fairly horrendous ratio of devices-to-people and the cost didn't make sense," Wheatley said, adding many employees had their own printers sitting on their desks. "We wanted to develop a smarter way to fax, copy, and print, and [adopt] more environmental considerations around toner and paper use."

With those straightforward intentions, Telstra went to a number of undisclosed vendors looking for solutions and in the end it was user and device management that won the deal for Canon.

"Canon took it a step beyond as it also put on table the whole management of the devices [and] Canon worked with us when auditing the buildings," Wheatley said.

Each building needed to be "audited" to determine the capacity and type of MFD best suited to its employees' requirements. Installations began 12 months ago and the 150 main sites were completed last month. The smaller offices will now be equipped as required.