TelstraClear(MIS100 2009)

By CIO staff | Friday, July 24 2009

2008 ranking: 62

Senior IS executive: Andrew Crabb, CIO
Reports to: Allan Freeth, chief executive officer
Size of IS shop: 225

PCs: 1725
Mobile PCs: 465
Terminals: 740
Hand-held devices: 230
Total screens: 3160

Industry: Information
PC environment: Dell; Compaq; Toshiba; Mac; Windows 2000, XP
Server environment: IBM; Compaq; HDS; Sun; Dell; McAfee Web Shield; HP; MVS; Citrix Access Gateways; Windows 2003, 2000, NT; Linux SUSE; Red Hat
DBMS: DB2, Access, Oracle, Sybase, MySQL, Postgres; Smallworld, SQL
Address: Smales Farm Office Park Corner of Northcote and Taharato Roads, Auckland
Website: www.telstraclear.co.nz
Key IS projects this year: Local Loop Unbundling,; billing upgrade; service management; PCI DSS.


TelstraClear is continuing work connected with the Local Loop Unbundling legislation in 2009, along with IP product development. CIO Andrew Crabb says ICT is critical to the delivery of business functionality for TelstraClear.

Order entry and billing is managed via IT systems, and automation of provisioning and activation of services is supported by a myriad of back-end systems. While ICT budgets are likely to remain “fairly static” through the 2009 fiscal year, a detailed review of all costs is occurring now and will be ongoing.

In 2008 TelstraClear invested in business intelligence systems and VoIP and unified communications technologies. Software and server virtualisation projects were also enhanced to deliver associated cost reductions and easier server management. Like many organisations, TelstraClear also invested in disaster recovery and business continuity upgrades, and initiated Web 2.0 projects.

The largest areas of ICT investment for 2009 are development of systems that support unbundling of the local loop, development of new customer products and services, along with a LAN/WAN and desktop integration and refresh that Crabb says may incorporate some virtualisation. Other areas of investment will occur in ERP and business intelligence systems, continued work on unified communications and VoIP platforms and technologies, and further work on Web 2.0 projects.

TelstraClear conducts almost all ICT function in—house with the exception of some applications development, which is outsourced to Daemon, Aabsol, Soltius and other providers.