Virgin moves IT staff into Optus

After five years operating separate information technology departments, Virgin Mobile Australia (VMA) has decided to move a large chunk of its operations to Optus' Macquarie Park campus, and has acquired some Oracle Sun kit.

The wholly-owned Optus subsidiary in the past fortnight made the call to shift around a quarter of its 400 strong workforce to its parent company following an internal review of its operations.

Exact numbers have not been revealed by VMA, however it's expected that about 100 staff, including its whole IT support team, as well as physical warehousing and logistics have been informed that they will work from Optus as of May 2010.

It's not known yet whether all IT staff who have been moved will retain their current roles after the move, however Virgin Mobile spokesperson Sarah Blades told ZDNet.com.au it was the company's intention to have a role for "absolutely everyone".

"We intend for all the people who currently work within the affected areas to either transfer to, or be redeployed within, Optus," Blades said.

Strategy and management for Virgin Mobile's IT services, headed up by chief information officer Nigel Grange, will remain at its North Sydney headquarters.

"All components relating to the delivery of systems and technology will remain at Virgin Mobile," said Blades. "Systems support and operations including help desk will be moving to Optus. It makes sense for us leverage their support capability."

VMA's products and services strategy will also remain at its headquarters, according to Blades.

The telco would not disclose how much it hoped to save by merging parts of its IT department, however the project is expected to deliver lower operational costs and remove duplicated functions.

VMA has committed to further investments in its Oracle Exadata data warehouse. The product set combines storage hardware that Oracle inherited from Sun after its acquisition was approved earlier this year.

The company has also nearly completed its point of sale migration to a Pronto point of sale platform, which had been implemented by local integrator, Applied Business Technology. Fellow mobile telco Vodafone Hutchison Australia has been another telco to recently settle on the Pronto platform.