Internode in damage control mode over 'restructuring'

Stuart Corner
Saturday, 03 September 2011 15:43

Opinion and Analysis

When a high profile company gets rid of four senior high-profile executives it needs to take the initiative instead of waiting for the bad news to leak out.

Among the IT community Internode has long been one of Australia's most high profile ISPs due in large part to the efforts of its founder, Simon Hackett who - unencumbered by the restraints applied to heads of public companies - has been free to say pretty much what he liked.

He's been ably aided and abetted by senior Internode executives Mark Newton and Matthew Moyle-Croft both of whom have been frequent and opinionated contributors to Whirlpool, as has Hackett.

The company has consistently topped Roy Morgan Research's rankings for ISP customer service, been a pioneer of IPv6 and consistently churned out 'good news' press releases at the rate of two or three every month.

So when Internode last week instituted a 'restructure' that resulted in the departure of Newton, Moyle-Croft and two other senior executives it would have been naïve to believe that this information could have been kept under wraps for long. Sure enough, it wasn't. And Internode was then forced into damage control mode.

Delimiter broke the story on Friday morning, getting hold of an email from CEO Patrick Tapper announcing the shake-up to Internode staff. The email said that CIO, Frank Falco, IT systems and network operations centre project manager Andrew Walton, peering, commercial and DSLAM team lead Matthew Moyle-Croft and core and infrastructure team leader (network operations) Mark Newton had left the company.

Tapper said in his email "Each of these individuals have made important contributions to Internode during their years with the company'¦We've carefully re-assessed a number of roles within the group, some of which have now become redundant. It's become necessary to make those critical changes within that team - none of which has been an easy decision to make.

"Simon Hackett has always been the technical director of Internode, but will take over a new title of CTO. The CIO role held by Frank will not be replaced, as Simon will have a greater 'hands on' role within the technology team."

Tapper was also reported to have alluded to "some very difficult times, especially over the last 12 months," on which he did not elaborate.

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