It's Telecom's secret weapon

Friday 9th March 2001

"Our secret weapon" is how Telecom chief executive Theresa Gattung describes the company's eSolutions offshoot.

The company sees eSolutions - a joint venture "virtual company" with EDS and Microsoft - as a necessary bridge for Telecom as it moves from being dominated by voice traffic to an increasingly data-dominated world.

The main face to the world presented by eSolutions is very much at the marketing and service side - it provides tools such as Business Exchange, an electronic procurement marketplace for buyers and suppliers.

By providing such online services for businesses - particularly small to medium-sized firms without the financial clout to provide their own - Telecom hopes to entice more customers online.

But internally, eSolutions has also wrought a change within the company.

As part of the arrangement, Telecom effectively outsourced much of its IT operation to EDS - at $1.5 billion it is understood to be the largest outsourcing contract in the southern hemisphere.

ESolutions was also the most public face of the change in attitude at Telecom.

It means Telecom no longer sees the need to do everything itself - a significant change from the old, fight to the death for every last bit of turf for which Telecom has been famous for much of its time as a private company.

The biggest eSolutions coup so far has been its role in Telecom winning the $A5 million contract to provide telecommunications and online solutions to Australia's Commonwealth Bank.

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