moves to Fletcher Building as general manager IT, Heavy and Light Building Products, reporting to group CIO Carl Powell.
Most recently, he worked as implementation director for Health Benefits, and before that, was with Vodafone NZ as head of IT.
Mike Smith, former Oxygen Business Systems CEO, takes on the newly created role of general manager cloud, infrastructure and data centres, at Spark Digital.
Reporting to CEO Tim Miles, Smith will have overall responsibility for the company’s data centres, cloud professional services and the Revera business.
Andrew Groth is appointed as Infosys regional head for Australia and New Zealand. He joined Infosys in 2010 to head its financial services business in Australia and New Zealand.
He has taken additional roles within Infosys, including head of financial services – Asia Pacific, and most recently as head of enterprise and industry services. He also chairs the company’s Corporate Social Responsibility program and represents Infosys in the Business Council of Australia.
Jo Healey is now the CEO of Dimension Data in New Zealand. Before this, she was managing director of Fujitsu New Zealand for three years.
Mark Nicholls is appointed director for New Zealand of content and animation company Toonz Entertainment.
“It’s the ideal time to grow a business in New Zealand which is experiencing strong economic growth,” says Nicholls, whose previous roles included director of Mondiale Freight. “The country has substantial talent, resources and a supportive government committed to growing the entertainment production sector. With this new base, Toonz will be able to maximise the synergies across Asia, New Zealand and Australia as well as offering opportunities to local businesses.”
Maria Bozina is appointed head of design and creativity at Solity, the Wellington-based software company specialising in crisis preparedness and incident management.
Amazon Web Services has launched Amazon WorkMail, a secure, managed business email and calendaring service in the cloud.
AWS says WorkMail integrates with existing corporate directories, and has the security features enterprises need to control and protect their data. Customers can quickly begin provisioning Amazon WorkMail accounts, and pay only for the mailboxes they create with simple, monthly pricing.
“Customers have repeatedly asked us for a business email and calendaring service that is more cost-effective and simpler to manage than their on-premises solution, more secure than the cloud-based offerings available today, and that is backed by the same best-in-class infrastructure platform on which they’re reliably running so many of their current (and future) workloads,” says Peter De Santis, vice president, AWS Compute Services.
“We built Amazon WorkMail to address these requests and to help businesses achieve agility and cost savings by letting AWS manage the non-differentiated heavy lifting involved in corporate email and calendaring.”
Alan Lepofsky, vice president and principal analyst – collaboration software at Constellation Research, says similar to Amazon’s file-sharing offering Zocalo, the advantage of Amazon WorkMail could be seamless integration with applications built on the AWS platform.
“If developers can easily add these features without having to use other vendors APIs it could save them time and money,” says Lepofsky. ”The challenge is, the email platforms from Microsoft, IBM and Google are extremely mature, offering integration with their respective brand’s social networking, file-sharing, video conferencing and office suites.”
Meanwhile, Microsoft is offering Kiwi small and medium businesses (SMBs) using Google Apps for Work a $25 per-user rebate if they purchase Office 365 before 30 April 2015 and switch before 31 May.
“New Zealand SMBs are leading the world in the adoption of Office 365. This is reflective of how Microsoft has worked consistently in helping Kiwi small businesses move to the cloud to experience enterprise-grade tools and benefit from substantial cost savings,” says Frazer Scott, director of marketing and operations, Microsoft New Zealand
Scott says that the campaign also aims to empower Microsoft partners with an attractive offer for their customers of a further 20 per cent off Office 365 when they buy through an Open Licensing Partner or Vodafone New Zealand.
“In New Zealand, SMBs account for 97 per cent of businesses and with cloud becoming increasingly affordable, it allows them to spend less time thinking about IT and more time focusing on what really matters, their customers, their staff – their business.”
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