Last year, Rhoda Holmes swapped her role as Australasian general manager of Telecom’s trans-Tasman ICT services business, Gen-i, for the position of CEO at Optimation, a long-established but significantly smaller operator with offices in Auckland and Wellington.

With Optimation founder and former CEO Neil Butler stepping into the chairman’s role, Holmes’s mandate was to use her industry experience to refocus the 17-year-old business for further growth in the competitive tier-2 provider
market.

It’s still less than a year since she started the role, but the changes at Optimation have been broad and deep as Holmes has fine-tuned her strategy for differentiating the business.

“The vision around bringing in an external CEO was that there are a number of tier-2 players in the New Zealand market and we’re all much the same size, so Optimation wanted a catalyst who could enable the business to partner, develop, and change some of the models in the tier-2 industry in order to grow us into something bigger,” she says.

The change process has included flattening the company’s management structure, building up its sales capability, re-engineering the branding and marketing strategy – a major exercise which will culminate in a soon-to-beunveiled brand refresh with associated new sales campaigns and a fresh approach to market.

“Optimation has been great at hiding its light under a bushel,” Holmes says.

“We’ve developed many innovative applications that people across the country would recognise. Part of the repositioning of the company is about opening up the clever things we’ve been involved in and helping to prompt people to say: ‘If they could do that for company X, I wonder if they could do this for us?”

Indeed, Optimation does have an impressive list of blue chip clients for whom it has done leading work. That customer list includes Air New Zealand, Vodafone, Westpac, Vero and several government departments.

Holmes says putting time into talking to the company’s clients – and prospective clients – has helped her fine-tune a business strategy based on what the market is looking for.

“From talking to CIOs, it’s clear the strategy of big players – the like of EDS and IBM who are about a ‘do-it-all’ approach in IT or telecommunications – is falling out of favour somewhat with clients,” she says.

“The advantages of being small and nimble at the moment is that you can turn up to a client with a proposition and quickly do a deal around a proposition that you’ve got, then rapidly show them how you can add value.”

Another advantage for tier-2 operators is that they are better placed to form partnerships, she says.

“Rather than having competitors, we’ve got a lot of people we can partner with. You don’t have teams of lawyers working on it, you just have a shared understanding of a customer outcome – that’s a massive advantage.”



Other advantages a company of Optimation’s size can tap into include the ability to develop areas of specialty, and to work iteratively with clients.

“We don’t have to be all things to all people, we can choose what work we go after and then do it very well in a very high quality way. Often in a larger organisation there’s a little bit of everything, but not a deep speciality in anything,”
Holmes says.

“And there’s nothing better than having the CIO of a client sitting in our offices, not only working in an agile way on a bit of software we’re developing for them, but also picking up what he’s hearing about the conversation, the organisation, giving you a customer perspective all the time that just doesn’t happen in big organisations where the rules are too tight and you miss out on that really friendly interaction.”

A key part of Optimation’s growth plans involve growing its managed outsourcing capabilities, or “putting a Kiwi face on outsourcing,” as Holmes describes it.

She admits the strategy suffered a stumble early this year when its Indian partner of two years, Satyam, became embroiled in a fraud scandal, which ultimately brought it to its knees, but says Optimation remains committed to offering outsourcing as part of its service mix.

“When Neil Butler pioneered the relationship with Satyam eight years ago he turned out to be very innovative in terms of predicting the significance Indian outsourcing would have globally in the ICT industry.

“Despite Satyam’s issues, this year we have been able to deliver two outsource-based projects – worth several million dollars – for the Department of Corrections. In fact, our ability to deliver these has actually proven the robustness of the model – because we were managing the relationship, Corrections were completely protected from Satyam’s issues.”

Optimation has subsequently formed a new outsourcing
relationship with HCL, which Holmes sees as the next step in the company’s outsourced offering.

“HCL has significant business in New Zealand, including a major contract with Fonterra, plus work with others including Vodafone and Westpac, so it’s much more like a meeting of equals. While we’ll continue to be the sales and relationship and commercial front end, they bring to the party quite a bit of experience of working in this market.”

Another platform for Optimation’s growth involves growing its place in the security market, she says.

“We have a background and a history in providing security consulting and security products in and around our applications and we’ve recently made a big hire: Steve
McDowell, who has joined from TelstraClear and who is driving a vigorous programme of stepping us up in terms of where we sit in the security market.

So expect to hear more from Optimation, as the company becomes more vocal about its role as a facilitator of business growth.

“I see technology as being a major driver in the increase in productivity New Zealand needs, so moving into that smarter link with IT thinking about how you solve your business problems is where I see Optimation going in the future,” Holmes says.

“It’s hard to make a call in these tough economic conditions but one of the fundamental beliefs I have is that those organisations that invest in their brand, their positioning and making sure their clients know who they are in these times will be the winners. That’s why you’ll see us making a significant investment in that in the short term, just to say we’re here, and we’re delivering for our customers.”

For more information

> Optimation, www.optimation.co.nz
Ken Fairgray, Business Development Manager
Ph 09 309 7918, ken.fairgray@optimation.co.nz


9/9/22_ex

By Simon Hendry