AAPT CEO gets the boot as TNZ takes direct control

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 22 February 2006 04:17

IT Industry - Strategy

Telecom New Zealand has announced that the role of AAPT CEO will cease to exist and incumbent, John Stretch will leave at the end of February. There will be a 'change to the structure' of its Australian operations that will see its CFO Marko Bogoievski, lead a new Mass Market business and its chief IT services officer, Mark Ratcliffe a managed customer business.

The Mass customer base incorporates consumer and small business customers who, TNZ says "will increasingly benefit from the development of IP-based services and lower cost to serve models."

The Managed segment includes "corporate and medium enterprises operating in a more complex environment with sophisticated integration needs."

Telecom NZ CEO, Theresa Gattung, claimed that the changes would enable the company "to deliver more effectively to its customers in Australia" and "reflect an intention to increasingly organise our business around our customers".

However the fact that there will be no dedicated CEO but rather two NZ executives overseeing the business 'part time' in addition to their existing roles would suggest that the business is simply being readied for sale or some other partnership arrangements most likely as two discrete entities: residential and small business and corporate, or perhaps with the corporate business being retainer.

Gattung said: "The new structure will mean that all of our managed customers will now be handled by a single team, and this will mean we can provide a better end-to-end service for our trans-Tasman customers".

She claimed that: "This new structure will enable us to better deliver against these different needs, and will ensure we are able to fully leverage the investments we have been making in provisioning, billing, customer care and operational support systems."

As iTWire reported earlier this month, AAPT is investing some $80 million in a complete OSS/BSS revamp based around BearingPoint's Infonova platform.

Gattung explained that there was "opportunity with consumer and small business customers to deliver a tighter core group of bundled services with significantly lower cost to serve models," and that "large business customers are increasingly embracing the convergence of telecommunications and IT services, and this requires a new model too as we seek to deliver seamless services in complex environments."