Movers and shakers: Anthony Bitossi, Pete Yates and Dr William Reedy

Rabid Technologies renames to Ackama; Daniel Hummerdal joins WorkSafe

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Anthony Bitossi is moving from chief information officer to General Manager of Stevenson Concrete. He stepped into the CIO role after more than three years as IS manager. In his new role, his responsibilities include managing Plant Operations, H&S, Dispatch, Sales and leads nearly 100 staff.

Pete Yates is now the inaugural chief technology officer at InterCity group, which operates the New Zealand-wide passenger transport and tourism networks of InterCity, GreatSights New Zealand, Fullers GreatSights, Gray Line and awesomeNZ.com.

Yates was most recently chief technology officer at HealthLink. His previous roles include head PMO, Operations, IT & Platforms at Spark Platforms at Spark Ventures, technology services group manager/CIO at Foster Moore, IS infrastructure manager at Auckland Council and Global Head of the Customer Ops Centre for a managed services provider based in the UK.

Dr William Reedy has been appointed director of digital health at Spark reporting to Jolie Hodgson as Spark focuses on growing its business in in the healthcare sector.

Daniel Hummerdal is joining WorkSafe New Zealand next month as chief advisor health and safety innovation.

WorkSafe chief operating officer Phil Parkes says recruiting Hummerdal is a coup for the agency.

“He brings a background in the development and implementation of Safety II and Safety Differently approaches to health and safety,” says Parkes. “These approaches move health and safety practices from pure compliance to a people and success-led approach and they are accepted worldwide as the future way of improving health and safety performance."

Hummerdal says his chief advisor role is unique amongst health and safety regulators around the world.

“Health and safety practitioners in New Zealand have always shown they’re open and willing to try new ideas, more so in my experience than anywhere else in the world. This presents me with a fantastic opportunity to try some cool new ideas to create a new future for health and safety in New Zealand,” he says.

Rabid Technologies is rebranding with a new name, look and website. Ackama, a software development company, will offer the same digital strategy, design and development services as before, as well as expanding its offering to include a new consulting service.

Ackama was started by New Zealand entrepreneurs Breccan McLeod-Lundy and Josh Forde.

Breccan, who was nominated for the Hi-Tech Young Achiever of the Year and the EY Entrepreneur of the Year awards this year, says, “the name Rabid was perfect for our early days, where we did a lot of short, sharp bursts of work. Now that we are building longer term relationships with our clients as a full technology partner, we need a brand that reflects that as we expand into South-East Asia and across the Pacific.”

Ackama, which is pronounced to rhyme with “llama”, is a small native New Zealand tree with white flowers and red seeds. It is found on the New Zealand coast from Whangarei north. Breccan chose a name based in nature to reflect that fact that Ackama work on large digital ecosystems, and nature is the biggest ecosystem of them all.

The name change comes as Ackama has expanded its business into Australia, by buying two Melbourne-based companies, Squareweave and Plot Digital, in the last three months.

“We’ve always done work overseas and now with a permanent base in Australia we can leverage our experience of working for government and commercial clients here, and an established team there, to create a trans-Tasman company with the scale to make a huge difference.” says co-founder Josh.

The new consulting arm of the business will be run by head of consulting, Kimberly Brabazon.

New Zealand company ODocs Eye Care has signed its first overseas international partnership with Riyadh’s King Saud University, which is the biggest medical university in the Arab world.

Dunedin-based ODocs chief executive, Dr Hong Sheng Chiong, an ophthalmologist registrar at Dunedin hospital, says they will supply their range of products including its latest eye-catching ophthalmoscope exclusively to the Saudi university for a connected population health project known as RAHAH.

“This is an exciting trailblazing project and a first for New Zealand. King Saud University will be integrating oDocs smartphone ophthalmoscope as a tool for telemedicine in the primary care sector.

“Then the university will use oDocs AI platform MedicMind to train and develop their own model for detection of diabetic retinopathy and a variety of other retinal diseases.”

MedicMind earlier this year created an artificial intelligence medical platform for medical researchers and clinicians to auto-diagnose a large range of diseases based on a single photograph.

Dr Hong and his Dunedin team built the MedicMind platform system, specifically designed for medical researchers with a mission to make improve diagnostic healthcare and make AI more accessible.

Nagaja Sanatkumar, Icebreaker’s general manager of global e-commerce at Icebreaker, has been recognised as an Emerging Director by the Institute of Directors Auckland branch.

Each year the Institute of Director branches make Emerging Director Awards to people who show leadership, integrity and enterprise in their careers. The IoD Auckland Branch, the biggest branch of the Institute of Directors of New Zealand with more than 3000 members, announced the award last week at a function at The Northern Club in Auckland.

The judges Ted van Arkel, Cecilia Tarrant and Bindi Norwell said they were “impressed with Nagaja’s international experience and her commitment to explore, learn and participate in the fast-moving world of the digital commercial sector".

"This, along with her passion for excellence, is a credit to her,” they said.

Chris Westall is appointed channel business development manager for the ANZ region at Vertiv.

He joins from Eaton Industries, where he worked as product manager for single phase and distributed control systems across ANZ. he will report directly to Daniel Sim, Vertiv’s senior channel director for Asia.