Ambitions in the cloud for Gen-i

Gen-i chief executive Tim Miles. Photo by Peter McIntosh.
Gen-i chief executive Tim Miles. Photo by Peter McIntosh.
Telecommunications continues to create headlines in New Zealand with debates over copper, the cloud and regulation. This week, Gen-i chief executive Tim Miles was in town and took time out to talk to Business editor Dene Mackenzie.

Gen-i chief executive Tim Miles has been involved in the ICT industry for more than 25 years, with a slight detour into the world of agribusiness through PGG Wrightson.

When he was looking around for another job, Mr Miles was convinced he needed to get back into technology and his quest became finding the company with the most capacity to offer.

Taking the next step in contacting Telecom chief executive Simon Moutter was difficult, as Mr Miles was the former chief executive of Vodafone New Zealand. However, once contact was made, the decision to join Gen-i was easy, he said.

With Gen-i owner Telecom about to spend $1.2 billion to $1.5 billion in capital expenditure over the next three years, Mr Miles (55) will have plenty to keep him busy as the company works on providing convergence services to its customers.

Convergence might be a buzz word in business, but for Mr Miles and his Gen-i team it is about providing customers with mobility, data and services from the cloud - the place where data is stored off-site by businesses or individuals.

In April, Telecom bought Wellington-based data centre company Revera for $96.5 million. The deal gave Telecom a route back into the market hosting IT infrastructure for government agencies after Gen-i missed out on an ''all-of-government'' tender in 2010. Mr Miles, who is chairman of the Revera board, said Telecom had a choice of building a data centre or buying one.

''We had some capability, but not as much as we wanted. We chose to spend $96 million buying the number one cloud provider in New Zealand and we now have 150 people doing nothing but cloud.''

One of the things Mr Miles had noticed from some of his larger clients was they no longer wanted a large IT department to manage technology. Increasing numbers of companies wanted infrastructure support off-site and a data centre was an important part of the service.

Gen-i was opening a new data centre in Christchurch, was expanding in Wellington, operated a large centre in Auckland and was considering expanding the centre in Dunedin.

Telecom and Gen-i also looked at whether they needed to build something alone or whether they could find a partner in a project. Telecom had joined with Huawei to build the 4G network because of the company's experience in building 4G networks internationally, he said.

Among the challenges Mr Miles faced as chief executive was ensuring staff were kept aware of all the changes being implemented in the company.

Gen-i operated from Invercargill to north of Whangarei and he described the company as ''in transition, but making progress''.

The company had to become better at providing the conver-gence of its services. It had ''great'' capacity on both the IT and telecommunications side of the business with half of its 2000 staff being IT professionals.

Asked what his six-month goal was, Mr Miles said he wanted customers to say they could see a positive change in Gen-i.

''We have had that feedback from several customers already but there is much more to come, I hope. This change is all being done with them in mind. We want to win more clients and we want to become a company that people want to work for.''

 

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