Datacom Group(MIS100 2009)

By CIO staff | Friday, July 24 2009

2008 ranking: 44

Senior IS executive: Steve Matheson, chief operating officer
Reports to: CEO
Size of IS shop: 3000

PCs: 2559
Mobile PCs: 500
Terminals: 0
Hand-held devices: 200
Total screens: 3259

Industry: IT supplier
PC environment: Windows XP, Vista; HP; IBM
Server environment: HP, IBM, Sun, Microsoft, Linux, Unix
DBMS: SQL
Address: 210 Federal Street, Auckland
Website: www.datacom.co.nz
Key IS projects this year: Financial systems; storage upgrades.

The past year has seen Datacom expand to more than 3000 staff across New Zealand, Australia and Asia. Commensurate with its position as a significant supplier of IT services to the public and private sector, Datacom understandably ensures its own ICT systems and solutions are representative of what it can offer customers.

Chief operating officer Steve Matheson says key business objectives for the next 12 months include rollout of next generation managed services/shared services offerings based on Datacom’s new datacentre investment. Also on the agenda this year is the need to finalise a new datacentre project in Wellington and continue to enhance services levels and economies for Datacom’s existing customer base. The new datacentre in Wellington will be purpose built and standalone, with capacity for more than 500 racks — both caged and non-caged.

Streamlining business continuity and disaster recovery systems is an ongoing point of focus. Secure datacentres running ITIL processes are located in Auckland, Wellington, Sydney and Melbourne with disaster recovery sites in Auckland and Christchurch. Regular facilities include firewall security, internal access, CA alarm/alerting, shared SAN storage and self-service access to help desk, performance figures and control centre statistics and status.

Datacom presently has a hybrid VoIP network covering seven sites and this will continue its expansion this year according to business demand.

Over the next 12 months, server virtualisation remains a priority where applicable, as does desktop and server replacements, more SANs and network infrastructure upgrades. On the software side, the emphasis is on service oriented architectures and making better use of legacy systems and databases.