STA Travel's network is flying thanks to "ground-up rebuild"

What is an example of a recent project involving a channel partner?

When I started at STA about four-and-a-half years ago, all of our retail outlets across Australia and New Zealand had 1MB network links. With a lot of our services moving either to an internal host or the cloud, our reliance on our network links has become more critical. We sat down and discussed our future application and technology requirements with Sydney-based company Enablis, and we went through architecture suggestions and bandwidth requirements. It pretty much turned into a complete ground-up rebuild of our entire network infrastructure.

What did they do that impressed you? 

That was the most seamless project I’ve been involved in. Network links were all done in parallel; they had a tech come on-site with new equipment, and it was just a repatch over to the new network and everything was up and running. It was 90 stores and it only took a few months to get through the entire job, doing between five and eight stores a week with almost no down time at all.

Is your use of partners likely to increase or decrease?

We are increasing the number of partners we have. I wouldn’t be investing in a partnership if it was going to be at the detriment of our service levels. We are very selective about who we partner up with and what we get them to do for us.

Are you looking to increase or consolidate the number of partners you work with?

It isn’t always going to be the one supplier who gives us everything. We are finding that there a lot more options than there used to be. Some of those options might be smaller companies, but they provide a
very specific set of products or a solution to a problem, rather than trying to solve your problems. If the standard off-the-shelf product is not going to give us what we need, we find one that is a very niche and will give us a bit of an advantage.

What is the key to increasing partner numbers without increasing your overheads?

I have been fortunate enough to rebuild the entire environment from the ground up across all of the Asia-Pacific. 

But what it comes down to is whether you are inheriting someone else’s design and setup or starting from scratch, keeping it as absolutely simple as you can from an administration and implementation perspective is absolutely critical.  

RESUME

June 2012 – present 
 IT manager Asia-Pacific, STA Travel

November 2005 – Jun 2012 
Infrastructure team leader, Salmat

April 2001 – Nov 2005 
Systems engineer, MTM