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Movers and shakers: Richard Raj takes on new digital and innovations leadership role at Frucor

Movers and shakers: Richard Raj takes on new digital and innovations leadership role at Frucor

Shayne Tong joins Genesis; plus accolades for 11Ants and Intergen

Richard Raj steps up to the new role of Group Digital Solutions and Innovations Manager for Business Technology at Frucor. The role covers responsibility over New Zealand, Australia and any of Frucor’s international business, says Raj.

This role is a reflection of IT’s changing direction and focus into digital and innovation, says Raj, who was previously Group IT Solutions Manager, NZ and Australia at Frucor.

Raj points out the new role is also linked to Frucor’s repositioning the IT department from Information Technology, to Business Technology.

“The aim is to rapidly grow a technology capability that is externally focused and focused on using technology for deeper engagement with our consumers and customers as well as driving business growth,” he states.

Richard Raj
Richard Raj

The aim is to rapidly grow a Technology capability that is externally focused and focused on using technology for deeper engagement with our consumers and customers as well as driving business growth

Richard Raj, Frucor


"Renaming the department to Business Technology better reflects this shift of focus from technology for 'efficiency' to technology for 'business growth'."

This does not mean efficiency and service are not important, he explains. “They absolutely are fundamental to our current and future success. However, it does mean that we will focus the larger part of our capital spend and resource on ‘Digital for Growth’ initiatives."

Among the areas he will cover are development and delivery of Frucor’s digital solutions/strategy; management of Group BT investment roadmaps (capex portfolio or projects); the Project Management Office; systems integration and database administration; and business partners relationship management.

New interim CIO for Genesis Energy

Shayne Tong joins Genesis Energy as interim Chief Information Officer, taking over the role from Chris Trigg, who is now with Southern Cross Health Society as Head of Information Systems and Business Transformation. Before this, Shayne was General Manager in Group Technology & Digital at Fletcher Building.

Shayne Tong
Shayne Tong

Sir Iain Lobban, former Director of the British intelligence agency GCHQ, joins Wynyard Group as strategic adviser on cybersecurity. Sir Iain was director of GCHQ - the Government Communications Headquarters - between 2008 and 2014 having previously served as director general of operations from 2004.

"Cyber threats are rife, compromises commonplace, the consequences far-reaching,” he says, in a statement. “Advanced cyber analytics solutions such as Wynyard's ACTA can be a game changer. It allows business leaders to make the most of one of the key advantages that they possess: expert knowledge of their own networks, how they function and when they've been corrupted. This puts organisations in a strong position to defend their networks against bad actors constantly looking for a vulnerability to exploit."

Hard work pays off for 11Ants Analytics

Retail and airline data analytics specialist 11Ants Analytics has won the “innovative software product of the year” award in Microsoft New Zealand’s 2016 Partner Awards for its 11Ants RAP (retail analytics platform).

It is the first time the annual awards recognise New Zealand independent software vendors (ISVs) that have built an innovative product utilising Microsoft and cloud technologies.

“11Ants Analytics has enormous global potential and is already becoming a great Kiwi export story, from start up through to global ISV,” the judges’ stated.

Read more: How to build a change capable organisation

11Ants Analytics’ CEO Tom Fuyala says Microsoft NZ’s acknowledgement comes after many years of hard work to get the retail analytics platform to the stage where he and his team believe it is the world’s easiest customer analytics platform to both deploy and use.

“I believe we continue to be developing one of the more technically complex solutions in the world on Azure, but we are able to hide the technical complexity from the end user,” says Fuyala. “Billions of elements of retail data appear as a beautiful graphic user interface. The user is able to make some simple settings and click ‘analyse data’.”

11Ants was founded by the University of Waikato’s commercial arm, WaikatoLink, and received venture backing from Endeavour Capital and NZVIF. Last year the company was acquired by a global consortium comprising Air New Zealand and the Canadian marketing and loyalty analytics company Aimia.

Microsoft Partner awards for Intergen

Another major winner at the recent Microsoft Partner Awards is Intergen.

Intergen was awarded Data Analytics Partner of the Year for its work delivering a self-service business intelligence environment for travel company JUCY. Intergen’s work with Ryman Healthcare on the retirement village operator’s transformative myRyman app was recognised in two awards: Devices and Deployment Partner of the Year Windows App Developer Partner of the Year (the latter received jointly with NV Interactive).

Simon Bright, NZ CEO of Intergen
Simon Bright, NZ CEO of Intergen


Andrew Kosmadakis, Intergen’s Practice Manager, Cloud Design and Integration, has also been awarded in the Partner Seller of the Year category.

Intergen CEO Simon Bright says the group is excited to be recognised as winners across several categories, and to have received more awards in a single year than ever before. "We were also particularly pleased to have Intergen’s work on Ryman Healthcare’s myRyman app recognised in two awards.

Read more: The 2016 CIO100 report: Full speed ahead

“The myRyman app is one of the most innovative and forward-looking projects Intergen has had the privilege of working on and is an excellent example of mobile, cloud-based technologies helping to enhance and enrich the lives of an organisation’s end users; in this case, Ryman’ residents.”

New team members at The Instillery

Mike Jenkins, CEO and founder of Kiwi-owned cloud advisory and managed services provider The Instillery, announces the appointment of three new team members.

Mike Jenkins
Mike Jenkins


They are:

Emma Krouglova joins The Instillery in the newly created role of World-Wide Business Development Executive. She brings a wealth of account management experience after more than six years of working in retail, tourism and SaaS, most recently in a four-year career with Kiwi-owned global SaaS business VEND.

Emma Krouglova
Emma Krouglova


Matt Hare is Principal Cloud & DevOps Consultant, bolstering the Consulting practice of the Kiwi-based Instillery team. He brings a few (well overdue) grey hairs to the team, as well as unparalleled experience and knowledge gained from working in Cloud, Development and DevOps with a large range of enterprises, digital agencies & SaaS providers, both here and in the UK, including Touchcast, Cornerstone & Smallworlds, says Jenkins.

Read more: Digital champions


Bram Horton joins the team as Cloud Services Architect. He was most recently a DevOps engineer at Spark Digital and IB Boost (Europe) and brings more than five years of experience in design and administering Linux systems to The Instillery.

Bram Horton
Bram Horton

Send news tips and comments to divina_paredes@idg.co.nz

Follow Divina Paredes on Twitter: @divinap

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Tags disruptionAir New ZealandStartupuniversity of waikatogenesis energyfrucorCIO100Richard Raj11Ants

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