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?
(more…)
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…)
by chris | Apr 9, 2014 | Energy
Vector and United Networks are shifting away from a volume-based pricing methodology in favour of a peak demand weighted tariff structure.
From April 1st, large customers in Central and South Auckland will see little advantage in seasonal Summer Day prices as these are aligned to a reduced Winter Day rate/kWh while the demand tariff will increase by 12.8%. North and West Auckland customers on non-demand time of use metered load groups will be transitioned over to a new pricing plan that includes a peak demand charge.
Added to this is the continuation of the stepped increase to the Power Factor tariff. Customers with reactive load problems will be in for even bigger charges as the rate per reactive unit increases from $2.00/unit to $8.00/unit. Based on discussions with the energy retailers, this charge will again be increased to $17.50/unit from April 1 next year.
What does this mean?
For Central and South Auckland customers with non-seasonal based peak demands with small Power Factor issues could see overall network cost increases of greater than 9.5%. For a similar North or West Auckland customer being transitioned onto the time of use metered load group with demand charges this increase could be greater than 15%. (more…)
by DavidSpratt | Mar 31, 2014 | ICT
Owning and operating computer equipment is becoming as redundant a concept as using generators to access electricity. While there are cases where generators are essential these are niche applications. The rest of us just plug into the grid with a three pin plug! Utility computing is exactly the same and will rapidly transform the way we see IT. Of course change of this magnitude has a big impact on people…
This article describes the challenge for organisations who are having difficulty persuading the existing IT technologists to get past the fear of losing their jobs or becoming irrelevant, when the reality is often quite the opposite. This has proved a significant barrier to acceptance of cloud computing in the New Zealand marketplace.
From Total Utilities perspective, we are seeing the focus move away from technologists owning and operating equipment and towards financial and capacity monitoring and analysis as a core activity. It is no longer a question of ‘Which brand do I use and does it have flashing lights?’. Rather it is ‘How do I cost my options and then monitor capacity and financial performance once I am committed?’
That’s where we come in.
Read the Herald article here
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.
