Today we announced that Telecom has made its final bid to Crown Fibre Holdings (CFH) to be considered as a partner in the Government’s Ultra-fast Broadband (UFB) initiative, and accelerated the reorganisation of our business to meet the needs of our clients in a fibre-based world.
The Telecom offer follows months of detailed negotiations with CFH, and two years of engagement overall. Our focus now shifts from negotiating with CFH to getting ready for the UFB environment, which will see us either demerging as the UFB partner or competing with new entrants in the access business.
The timelines are very short for either scenario, so we must begin the work now, before the Crown has made its decision on the awarding of the UFB contract.
Whether or not Telecom is a chosen partner, UFB will fundamentally reshape the telecommunications and IT industry in New Zealand. Paul Reynolds, Telecom Chief Executive, today also outlined organisational changes to prepare for this.
For more information read the Telecom press release
Benefits for Gen-i clients
The reorganisation is part of a process to focus on what our customers’ value; simplify our operations to ensure it’s easy to do business with us and reduce costs for our clients.
Gen-i is already well along this process, with a programme of work that began in December 2009 to simplify our business and use our costs well, with an emphasis on looking at the value to our clients of every dollar we invest.
The changes we announced today include the creation of a new Network Product business unit, which has been created to integrate our product and pricing activity across the company. A key focus of the new Product Office will be to rationalise hundreds of Telecom products to reduce cost and complexity, while making it much simpler for our people to work with – resulting in the best client outcomes because of the efficiencies gained.
The new Telecom product business unit will be accountable for product and pricing from concept right through to delivery, so we can remove some of the duplication we have at the moment with multiple teams across our business building different products in different business units, for different customers.
The centralisation of product and pricing activity is for non-regulated telecommunications products. The impact on Gen-i will be limited as Telecom’s Retail, Wholesale, Chorus and T&SS business units already provide us with the majority of our telecommunications products and pricing end-to-end. This will not change our commitments and ability to deliver to you as our clients.
There will be no changes to our teams developing our IT product portfolios, including cloud computing, professional services, procurement and IT services.
We expect that there will be changes to some roles in our Hosted Voice platform and Managed Data teams, and tweaks to some roles in Voice and Mobile. This will be done in consultation with the new Chief Product Officer, as the design and structure of the new business unit is finalised to remove any potential duplication.
We’re working at pace to take a sensible look at how we’re best to split the underlying network product from our business market services.
As we invest in our future business model, we will be conducting further reviews of the way our business operates, to enable growth and to meet the current and future needs of our clients. While working through our internal organisational reviews to improve how we support our clients, we are committed to ensuring we are not distracted from delivering for your business.
I will continue to keep you informed about further decisions around the UFB process, and any changes to Gen-i. If you have any questions, or want to discuss this further with me or any of the Gen-i team, please let us know.
Chris Quin
CEO Gen-i Australasia