Stories by CIO New Zealand

Doing business with:.
Janne Halonen

Digital agency Heyday has won three categories at the 2011 edition of the ONYAs web industry awards. The victories include the supreme ONYA for Most Outstanding Website, for Down to the Wire.
The agency, formerly Doubleclique, entered the ONYAs for the first time this year, as it celebrated its 10th anniversary by relaunching itself as Heyday.

CAA has adopted Datacraft’s one.govt solution and the result of the partnership has gone live this month.
One.govt is a suite of telecommunications deployed by Datacraft to meet the needs of government agencies. It replaces CAA’s existing WAN and telephony solution and includes internet, voice gateway and hosted IPT services based on Cisco UCM infrastructure, as well as a replacement for CAA’s LAN and wireless networks.

Local IT stakeholders are forming a New Zealand ‘international review’ group to an ISO/IEC subcommittee on cloud computing services.
Debbie Chin, Standards New Zealand chief executive, says the review group will ensure New Zealand can contribute to the development of international cloud computing standards.

Despite fragile consumer confidence, most retail banks do not view social media as an important tool to engage with customers, putting them in a dangerous position, analyst firm Ovum claims.
An analyst for the company, Martha Bennett, says banks without a social media strategy is a major issue "in an era of aggressive competition".

Former TrustPower CIO Nelson Tkatch takes on the managing director role next week at Xenacom, joining the ranks of CIOs who have moved in to senior executive roles.
Tkatch has been a director of the company for the past two years. Xenacom is a privately held New Zealand company providing mobile application development services.

Fujitsu’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service range has been chosen by Fujitsu Australia & New Zealand as the underlying platform for the CA Clarity PPM On Demand suite.
“Having realised successes globally for our CA Clarity PPM On Demand product, we felt it was important to offer our customers the same, local hosting options through a trusted partner. Fujitsu has filled this role and I’m confident that our local customer-base will benefit directly from this move,” said Brenton Smith, vice president and area manager of CA Technologies, Australia & New Zealand.
The deal includes servers, storage, internet provision, backup and management software, along with data replication and retrieval.
“By investing in industrial scale infrastructure, Fujitsu can provide levels of security and availability which are a bridge too far for all but the very largest enterprises,” said Rob Vawdrey, CEO of Fujitsu Australia & New Zealand. “As with all Fujitsu’s data centre customers, CA Technologies now has the confidence of complete security in a strongly managed cloud platform to underpin its SaaS offering in the local marketplace.”

IT consulting and telecommunications top Randstad’s list of IT industry sectors for 2011, closely followed by banking and finance.
According to Paul Robinson, Randstad’s general manager, “the improving economic conditions will lead to increased business confidence in systems investment, which will in turn fuel growth in technology professional services firms in 2011”.

The Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) has chosen Triquestra to develop and provision a revenue collection, recording and reporting point of sale system, along with support services for up to five years.
The contract has been awarded after a RFP process and includes the development of cross-functional integrations with a number of legacy systems, including Oracle Financials.

Blue Wing Honda, the official New Zealand importer of Honda road motorcycles, has implemented Lawson for Distribution, a software especially designed for distribution companies.
Lawson Software, the creators of Lawson for Distribution, said that Blue Wing Honda is the first customer in the Australia and New Zealand region to finish the implementation of the latest release of the software.

Waldo Kuipers has been appointed corporate affairs manager for Microsoft New Zealand, effective immediately.
Kuipers will represent Microsoft on public policy issues such as intellectual property rights, interoperability and standards, privacy, security and internet safety and communications.

Reconstruction, deconstruction, transformation, and consolidation — are recurring themes in IDC New Zealand’s ICT services predictions, but it is the rate at which these themes will fuse that will make the difference in 2011.
"IDC's predictions illustrate that 2011 will be the year when IT service providers will need to take a microscopic view of their business to identify any gaps in their strategies, including potential fusion or alignment with the broader ICT ecosystem," says Rasika Versleijen-Pradhan, IDC senior IT services analyst.

The coming 12 months is set to be a year of transformational and unpredictable change for New Zealand ICT, reports IDC.
"The future of the telecommunications sector hangs in the balance, awaiting critical policy and commercial decisions that will begin a long-term deconstruction and reconstruction of the industry. All ICT markets will be impacted. At the same time, the current wave of disruptive technologies - mobile computing, cloud services and social networking - will mature from early adopter status," says Ullrich Loeffler, IDC New Zealand country manager.

Greenstone Energy has partnered with Fusion Transactive to work on the replacement of all point of sale systems across its Shell-branded service stations and truck stops in New Zealand.
The $10 million investment in new technology is expected to increase speed of transactions and improve overall customer service.

Name: Rob Forsyth
Company: Sophos