David Spratt, ICT analyst from Total Utilities Management Group, reviews 2012 with a mixture of humour, bile and straight up taking the mickey.

Up’s

• Cloud services

The tired old voices of vested interest have been drowned out in the rush to take advantage of lowers costs, flexibility and superior availability of cloud services.

When was the last time you heard some conceited individual from vendorland asking you to “define cloud services”?  It’s been a while – because they have either been laid off or work for Google now.

• Hosting Cloud Services in New Zealand.

Revera, Gen-i and Datacom take a bow. Hosting Office 365 in New Zealand breaks the back of anti-cloud arguments around sovereignty, ownership and control of applications and data.

The first player to host RackSpace or a similar overseas infrastructure service in New Zealand will do all of us a favour by killing off existing ‘vested interests’.

• Telco mergers

Bringing Vodafone’s focus on quality business and retail services to bear on a tired, bureaucratic and disinterested old dog like Telstra Clear might just work. Voda’s new found ownership of a high speed, national fibre network should have other NZ telco strategists thinking long and hard about how to meet this threat.

The marriage between Kordia and Orcon promises to be a breath of fresh air in a market begging for credible competition. Kordia’s focus on quality can sometimes mean a bit of over the top engineering. On the other hand, flexible and aggressive Orcon has been delivering iffy service at a low price.

A merger made in heaven if these players can make it work in the engine room.

The challenge: Network aggregation

Who will be the first to genuinely act as a secure, functional integration point for local and international cloud based services, private, public and community?

Expensive to do?  Yes!  Easy to make happen?  No!  Important to New Zealand companies fighting for a share of the global digital economy – absolutely!

Down’s

• Pacific Cable’s failure to proceed.

How can a billion dollar investment in UFB make any sense when our overseas connections have all the performance of an eighty year old’s prostate?

All Economic Development Minister Steven Joyce had to say was that there was no issue with capacity on the Southern Cross cable and that retail prices for broadband were dropping quite significantly. Huh?

Mr Joyce’s complete lack of appreciation of the importance of this issue allows Telecom NZ International and its pals from SingTel and Verizon Business to remain as the sole provider of slow and overpriced international data services at the expense of our whole export economy.  With advice like this we would be better served disbanding the MED and putting the funds towards this worthy pursuit!

• Chorus and the Regulators

Chorus seem confused about their strategy while the regulator is stuck in the old ‘Telecom is bad, everyone else is good’ mode.

UFB is stuffed as long as Chorus has both hands tied behind its back by a regulator bent on retaining a controlling interest in innovation and company profitability.

• Upgrades and software renewals

The bane of CFO’s and the mainstay of older CIO’s attempts to hang in there until retirement day.

Until software and hardware vendors abandon self interest and return to providing measurable business value they will continue to be a bunion under the feet of companies competing in a global economy.

The steady downward trend in HP and Microsoft’s share prices serve to prove that the market is over these dinosaurs and sees a troubled future for them if they don’t move with the times.

  

Just Plain Crazy

Kim Dot Com’s offer:  Free broadband to all Kiwis

Kim you may have a brilliant mind but your ego has now outstripped your undoubted girth.

There are so many impediments to providing this kind of service (not least the opposition of a regulator bent on power and control) that you will probably be banged up in some US penitentiary long before this idea can be tested.  Hang on – maybe that’s what you had planned all along..?

 

A thought for 2013…

Don’t forget – if a vendor can’t explain how their latest upgrade or renewal offer will increase profit or drive revenue then it is what it seems – an overhead that requires immediate excision. 

 

Merry Christmas!