by chris | Sep 1, 2014 | Energy
Electricity price rises are coming from the regulated parts of the industry, writes Chris Hargreaves in the Sunday Star Times 31 August 2014.
Rod Oram’s recent comments in the Sunday Star Times and on National Radio were critical of the current market prices for retail energy and the way in which increased profits were distributed to shareholders by generators and retailers – rather than being used to bring retail pricing down.
While Rod’s comments bear thinking about, his analysis failed to take into account market changes over the past few years – and the considerable impact of key pricing factors such as transmission and distribution charges (both of which are regulated and out of the control of retail providers).
Rod Oram also appears unaware of the significant reductions in energy prices that have benefitted commercial users of electricity in the past. Total Utilities Management Group has seen reductions averaging 20% on recent contracts since the last quarter of 2012 as both generators and retailers have rebalanced their regional and commercial portfolios in response to changes in generation capacity, lower demand and increased regional competition.
Electricity pricing in New Zealand is far from transparent. This leads to uncertainty around how invoiced prices are derived and means that changes to the various cost elements can be difficult to police. This uncertainty can muddy the water when talking about the historical cost of contestable energy prices.
The Electricity Authority recently released a Statistics New Zealand survey covering historical retail residential pricing with figures backed up by the MBIE. (more…)
by DavidSpratt | Aug 25, 2014 | ICT
Having outlined some of the structural issues facing CIO’s and providers of cloud service management processes in my previous blog on managing cloud infrastructure I am left with a real challenge.
As a critic of the old, over scaled, expensive and wasteful ESM/ITIL based service management systems, how can I now offer some constructive suggestions on a new way of looking at service management in the cloud?
Cloud service management strategies
1. Find a common language
- ITIL provides a meaningful and commonly understood language for all parties. We can use this language to identify the differences between a global public cloud (Azure, Amazon, Google, Rack Space et al) and a locally hosted private or public cloud service management model (DIY, All of Government, Datacom, HP, Gen-i, IBM etc).
- We can run through the ITIL framework step by step and identify where the global public cloud provider owns the service management environment; where it is owned by a local outsourcer; and where this responsibility is shouldered by the internal IT Department.
- This allows the service consumer to see and pay for the value being delivered while ensuring all other parties have a clear, profitable and sustainable model for delivering on their promises.
2. Be clear on the desired outcomes
- Rather than requiring that major public cloud providers redesign their internal processes (unlikely when dealing with players bigger than Australasia’s biggest companies) we should instead focus on the key elements we require. Namely:
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by RichardGardiner | Aug 4, 2014 | Energy, ICT
An automated utilities monitoring service has been developed by Total Utilities to assist High Schools and Colleges spending more than $100,000/year on electricity, gas or computing and telecoms.
The new monitoring service will simplify financial management of utilities by generating and displaying usage reports to help identify trends. This will allow School Business Managers to quickly pinpoint any issues and will make investment and strategy decision-making more accurate, according to Mike Ette of Total Utilities.
“Many High Schools and Colleges struggle with the financial management of their utilities,” said Mike. “It’s difficult to know if you are getting value from these services if they are not monitored and measured. Once Business Managers can identify trends, it becomes easy to ask key questions like – is the usage increase in line with changes in the school? Or – nothing has changed so why is usage going up?” (more…)
by RichardGardiner | Aug 4, 2014 | Energy
Schools pay less for power by going to the market in bulk tenders which attract contract offers from multiple power suppliers. In the first six months of this year, Total Utilities has helped a group of seventeen schools save more than $350,000 on their renegotiated power contracts. This represents an average saving of almost $14,500 or 18% per school.
The bulk tender process was managed by procurement specialists, Total Utilities. All the school business managers had to do was supply details of their previous contract and weigh up the offers when they came in.
New Plymouth Girls High School was one of the participating schools and business manager Tony Pugh is delighted with the result. “This is our third contract negotiation with Total Utilities and we’ve saved money every time,” Tony explained. “This year we cut our power costs by 24% by getting more suppliers interested in quoting for our business and making the most of favourable contract terms.”
In the past Tony has had difficulties attracting such a wide range of offers. “It’s important to present the information to suppliers using the right language in order to get the best result – it can be very time-consuming to manage the process. Total Utilities was able to present us with eight offers from different suppliers, lay them out on a single page and recommend the best contract to us – based on dollars and contract terms.” (more…)
by DavidSpratt | Jul 23, 2014 | ICT
I get a strong sense that CIO’s across New Zealand want to make changes but feel burdened by their existing provider and service constructs. Ironically the situation is the same whether they do the work in-house or outsource it to a trusted provider.
CIO’s and Service Managers are also expressing increasing levels of concern around the Service Management and Service Desk environment needed to support private, public and hybrid cloud instances. Many providers seem to be struggling to monitor and support an infrastructure and services environment that has been designed by someone else and is located outside their control in the Public Cloud.
This difficulty is not unique to New Zealand. I have also had a series of conversations with some very large organisations struggling with the same issue in the US and Australia. So what is the cause of all this angst?
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by DavidSpratt | May 12, 2014 | ICT
When over 2000 people attended the Amazon Summit in Auckland recently, it was a clear sign that cloud-based services are now mature and garnering ever-increasing acceptance. Thousands more are attending Amazon’s partner roadshow around the country this month.
As if to cement our market’s acceptance of cloud services, Microsoft recently awarded Datacom its “Cloud Services provider of the Year Award” for its Zespri IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) project running over Microsoft’s own Azure Cloud platform.
For Datacom this was a big ‘thumbs up’ from Microsoft. It also confirmed that cloud services in New Zealand will, for a number of valid business reasons, often be a hybrid combination of local and international services. In this case the hybrid was a combination of cloud services from Microsoft’s Azure Cloud and Datacom’s own Enterprise Cloud service running out of its Kapua and Orbit data centres.
So while hybrid cloud flexes its muscles across New Zealand and around the world, life is never simple. The issue that has been taxing my mind for the past few months has not been the architectural or the transition requirements for moving to a hybrid cloud model. My preoccupation has more been with understanding, describing and delivering the Service Management that follows transition to the cloud.
The question is ‘How does a company or its provider measure, monitor, manage and optimise an environment where some or all of the components are delivered from behind a firewall, potentially thousands of miles away?’ (more…)
