Back in NZ for family

By Adam Gifford

A strong feel for the convergence between telecommunications and computing has tipped 15-year IBM veteran Russell Stanners into the top job at Unisys New Zealand.

Before deciding to bring his young family back to this country, Mr Stanners spent the past three years working out of White Plains, New York, as global leader of IBM's telecommunications solutions business.

He also has extensive experience in banking and finance and in the general commercial area.

"I made the decision to come back to New Zealand for family reasons," he says. "I have a 3-year-old daughter and twin boys who are 18 months, so I put up my hand to say I was available."

Mr Stanners says his hands-on experience in the United States has given him a good idea of the impact the internet will have on business here and the opportunities for completely new businesses to be formed.

He is expecting existing Unisys customers like the ASB to lead the way in building portals for customers to access a wider range of services.

"Our role there is to be the integrator and the technology provider."

As a vendor of mainframe computers, Unisys will be in the box seat in the development of application service provision (ASP). Mr Stanners sees this as harking back to where the industry was when he started 15 years ago, with many companies using applications hosted in service bureaus.

"We have seen a period where the customer focused on the application. We now understand that is still important, but the infrastructure and how we deliver that in a networked world is very important.

"The systems must be always available, they must never fail and they must have unlimited capacity. These are all our core competencies."

As revenues from calls, whether toll or local, fall away, telecommunications companies are reinventing themselves as internet providers and application service providers.

That means alliances and partnerships with IT companies, whether they are providers of hardware, software or services.

He says ASP is bringing new business models and pricing structures, with infrastructure providers supplying hardware, networking equipment and services in exchange for a share in returns. These are more likely to be subscription or transaction fees rather than licence fees.

"All those models are on the table."

He says the change will be evolutionary rather than revolutionary "because to be able to enable business processes in an on-line world, you need access to data, which means opening up existing systems and building on top of them.

"If companies have significant investment in their own infrastructure, it may be best to stick with that. If they have no infrastructure, it may be better to go to ASP."

Unisys New Zealand had revenues last year of $134 million, 75 per cent of which came from services.

It has a local staff of 550 people.

Mr Stanners says much of its strength comes from its continuing focus on solutions in a narrow range of industries: telecommunications, the public sector, banking and finance and retail distribution.

"It's a narrow focus but they are important for us and we will continue to see growth in those sectors.

"Electronic commerce is the big push coming up, as is outsourcing."