Voda NZ demerges billing from VHA
Vodafone New Zealand has reportedly separated its billing system from Vodafone Hutchison Australia.
Vodafone NZ separates from VHA
(Credit: Vodafone Australia)
New Zealand's number two telco completed the billing system separation over the Easter weekend, according to news publication The Dominion Post, after warning users to expect outages during the break.
ZDNet.com.au this afternoon confirmed Vodafone New Zealand's decision to end the merged billing system was due to the merger between the Australian arms of Hutchison Whampoa's 3 and Vodafone Australia, which meant sharing information across the Tasman was no longer appropriate.
"Given the merger that happened it was no longer appropriate to share information, so the billing system was brought back home,” said Vodafone New Zealand spokesperson Matt East.
Vodafone Australia and New Zealand's billing systems were brought together in 2007. At the time the company reported that the trans-Tasman billing system was planned to run on 13 HP Superdome farms, with three hosted in New Zealand.
The system was run by software from US vendor Portal Software. Other components included Siebel for customer relationship management, MetaSolv for provisioning, while IBM's WebSphere was to provide the integration layer.
Vodafone Hutchison Australia is just weeks away from announcing its new core network services supplier. The company is believed to have recently dropped 3's incumbent supplier Ericsson from the bidding process, leaving the race between Vodafone's incumbent supplier Nokia Siemens Networks and newcomer Chinese networking giant Huawei.
VHA is also reviewing its IT outsourcing contracts. 3's incumbent IT support provider is Australian IT services firm ASG.