MIS100 2012: Bubbling under

Senior ICT executive: Grant Strang, CIO
Address: 110 Jackson Street, Petone, Lower Hutt
Websites: www.nzracingboard.co.nz and www.tab.co.nz

The New Zealand Racing Board, the organisation behind all New Zealand racing and betting, is the co-ordination point for the TAB, which runs all betting on racing and sport in new Zealand, the three racing codes (NZ Thoroughbred, Harness Racing and NZ Greyhound), and the Judicial Control Authority, the legal body that administers the rules of racing and conducts inquiries into breaches of the rules, for all three racing codes.

The NZ Racing Board’s ICT services environment is mission critical as it enables broadcasting (Trackside and TAB TV), connectivity across 68 racetracks and 700 retail outlets, three telephone betting service centres and internet/mobile betting, webpage and corporate support, says chief information officer Grant Strang, who joined the NZRB earlier this year. The NZ Racing Board’s partnership with Gen-i is expansive, and now includes the provision of data, internet, voice, contact centre and mobile services, following the extension of an agreement in August last year for a further five years. “2012 to 2013 ICT investment decisions include options for further managed service partnerships and re-prioritisation of ICT projects, including test automation, core wagering platform, data centers and DR, new wagering products, server virtualisation and consolidation, PABX virtualisation, software as a service, CRM, application virtualisation, wi-fi technologies, unified communications, and an internal reset of ICT services aligned with the NZRB requirements from its ICT service providers,” says Strang.


Bunnings
2011 ranking: 93

Senior IS executive: David Hollies, IT services manager
Address: 78 Carbine Road, Mt Wellington, Auckland 1060
Website: www.bunnings.co.nz

In New Zealand, Bunnings has wholly adopted cloud services and outsourcing, for example through its agreement since 2010 with Gen-i for provision of its email systems and internet security. The company has entrusted these tasks to Gen-i’s hosted Managed Mail email management system and the Safecom range of cloud-based security services.

Internet traffic from all users at each of Bunning’s 17 warehouse stores, 25 smaller retail outlets, head office and its trade distribution centre, is filtered through Safecom. Meanwhile, with all email accounts controlled by Managed Mail, Gen-i takes care of time-consuming but run-of-the mill duties such as email archiving and spam filtering, while providing protection against email scams.

IT services manager, David Hollies, decided that doing this work in-house was not the best use of limited resources. In a case study on the project, created for Gen-i, he comments: “We have a very small IT team so there is no competitive advantage in managing email and internet security in-house. We would have needed to provide full redundancy with dual servers and 24/7 support. That builds significant cost to the business, but does not deliver any business advantages.”

Moving to a hosted environment has saved Bunnings the expense and effort of day-to-day management of its email and internet security environments. With the outsourcing experience having so far been so positive, Hollies admits he would outsource anything he could that is “noncore”, including point-of-sale systems.

“I understand some people have an anxiety about outsourcing, but if there are good SLAs between the customer and supplier then these concerns do not become an issue.”