Revenue was close to flat at $1.47 billion, which Davidson described as “a real achievement in a year when the economy was as difficult as it was and customers were prioritising the way they were”.
Datacom, 55% owned by the rich-list Holdsworth family and 45% by the New Zealand Super Fund, is New Zealand’s largest, home-grown IT services and data centre firm. It grew in part by acquiring NZ Post’s IT operation in 1991. (The Super Fund bought NZ Post’s stake in 2012). Its main operations are in New Zealand, Australia and southeast Asia.
Davidson was confident of growth in FY2025, in part because some of its new business across the Tasman was only partially booked in FY2024.
“There’s been some disruption in the network landscape in Australia and we’ve been able to get wins from that,” he said, adding that overall revenue certainly should be up year-on-year on the basis of those wins and taking them live in Australia.
AI pilots
A Technology Users Association of New Zealand (Tuanz) survey of chief information officers released earlier this month found CIOs under pressure from boards, managers and staff to implement artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives, while at the same time their overall IT budgets were tight.
Regardless, Davidson said AI business was expanding.
“We’ve got 40 or 50 varying levels of pilot going with customers at the moment, and a lot of it quite substantial,” he said.
Datacom also has multiple in-house AI projects underway.
Speaking of one example, Davidson said: “In our payroll business, Datapay, we’re using AI and machine learning for anomaly detection to improve payroll compliance and leave calculations and reduce the impact of common payroll errors. We recently launched a new Payroll Assistant which helps trained payroll professionals do their jobs efficiently by providing safe, intelligent access to the full body of payroll regulations,” Davidson said.
On another project, Davidson said: “Adoption of AI tools for coding really is changing the nature of how we’re going about doing software development here and making it massively more productive.”
His firm was also helping corporates, councils and others identify use-cases for AI, though Davidson also noted: “The biggest myth is that the AI thing is new. It’s been around for a decade or two. It’s just that ChatGPT and other arge language models that have popularised it.”
While AI is helping to fuel a boom in worldwide and New Zealand data centre expansion, Davidson said Datacom was well-placed to cater for a surge in AI. No major builds were planned for the current year.
Less tangible areas of AI will be in focus, including data integrity, cyber security and governance as AI adoption accelerates this year, Davidson said.
Simplification
Over the coming six months, Datacom will streamline into teams based around four lines of business, Davidson said: professional services, managed operations, SaaS (software-as-a-service) products and infrastructure products – including data centres, private cloud, networking and security.
As part of the project, the firms leadership team has been expanded to include director of professional services Sunny Katira and director of infrastructure products Mark Hile, while Stacey Tomasoni becomes managing director of managed operations. Phil Neutze – formerly chief financial officer at Auckland Airport – joined Datacom as CFO in March.
The restructure will enter its second phase over the coming months, with all teams set to be confirmed by the second half of the year.
Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald’s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.
