BlueCentral News

BlueCentral Appoints New Hosting Product Manager

Meile Worrad is the Product Manager of BlueCentral Enterprise.  Meile is responsible for the on-going management of the product lifecycle and the development of new hosting products and services.  Meile’s key focus is to ensure the product mix BlueCentral offer to our customers provides cost effective access to the latest and most relevant technologies to meet their business needs, importantly technologies and support services that assist our customers gain competitive advantage.

Meile has a depth of experience in the IT & T sector, having worked within the Telecommunications and Managed Hosting Services industry for over 10 years, with the last 7 years as National Product Manager of Hosting services for SingTel Optus. 

The charter of Meile’s last role was to understand the business requirements of small business, corporate and government clients and develop managed infrastructure and hosting services to support these needs. Critical to the role was understanding the infrastructure hosting and security requirements of clients and commercialising these services to support the changing needs of businesses. As the industry explores new approaches to delivering hosted computing services and considers private and public cloud strategies, Meile is focused upon commercialising BlueCentral’s Cloud Hosting Services definition and product strategy.

BlueCentral Appoints New Managing Director

Hosting and Mobility specialist, BlueCentral, has appointed a new managing director as it pushes into the mid-market space.

Olaf Moon replaces Anthony Banek, who has now been appointed general manager of online innovation, overseeing BlueCentral’s retail hosting business OzHosting. The staffing changes follow a company restructure which saw account management and marketing operations separated into retail and enterprise teams.

Moon said one of his initial priorities was to look at how the service provider can better push into the mid-market space.

“I’m going to determine where we sit in the market, and review our product set in light of worldwide market trends,” Moon said. “We have the goal to grow faster than the industry average, and move more into the midsize space. We’d previously been focused on the small market, but we feel the midsize is the least well served from a customer point of view – it’s high time those customers got some high quality service.”

Moon said he was also interested in the role, as he saw growth potential in BlueCentral, and appreciated the “sound” financial and organisational backing of IPMG which places BlueCentral in an extremely stable and well backed financial position.

BlueCentral are extremely fortunate to have Olaf Moon join the business as he brings over 30 years experience in the IT&T sector, specifically managing infrastructure and hosting markets to the business.

BlueCentral Offer High Availability Cloud Computing

As BlueCentral work with their customers they are increasingly hearing a need for an ability to access ‘High Availability’ platforms to support customer hosting requirements that have short term needs and do not want to be paying the fees necessary to access dedicated infrastructure solutions.

As such BlueCentral now offer ‘High Availability’, scalable enterprise grade, ‘Cloud’ computing models so that customers can simply place and order and log onto high performance infrastructure in days. Customers have already indicated their satisfaction as they can support ‘speed to market’ imperatives without entering long term contractual agreements and still have the ‘peace of mind’ that the service will deliver their availability expectations.

This service was a simple extension to a need in the market that is receiving rapid adoption, BlueCentral have leveraged enterprise grade infrastructure including technologies from EMC, Dell, VMware and Juniper to deliver a service that is enterprise grade yet simple and easy to purchase and implement. The service is accessible in a matter of days and is also being adopted by businesses needing server resources for migration, test, development or staging requirements.

BlueCentral Strengthens Sales and Marketing Operations

BlueCentral have recently bolstered their sales and marketing operations with the appointment of a number of key sales staff. Recently Graeme Watts joined the business as Sales & Marketing Director. Graeme has been working in the IT sector for over 15 years across managed infrastructure services and software markets.

Graemes' focus since joining BlueCentral has been heavily centred upon strengthening our sales and marketing activities which have including refocusing the businesses account management models including appointing four new members to the sales operations in account management and business development roles.

IPMG Invest in BlueCentral

IPMG have purchased and privatised the businesses now making up the IPMG ‘Interactive’ division. Michael Hannan, Group Managing Director of IPMG, said, “This privatisation brings to IPMG the largest and most diversified group of digital and interactive marketing communication companies in Australia.

“As members of IPMG, these companies are now in a prime position to grow their businesses substantially with the support of a strong parent company.

“IPMG’s history and heritage began in 1887. As a private Australian owned group, IPMG has built a very substantial business by exceeding our clients’ expectations with our considerable range of products and services.”

Mr Hannan said, “With a history of involvement in the printing, publishing, media and advertising industries, spanning 75 years, IPMG has widespread and strong relationships with the nation’s leading advertisers. The addition of these digital marketing and communication businesses to our long established and respected print brands adds further depth to the capabilities within our group to the benefit of our clients.”

David Burkett, CEO of IPMG’s Digital Media and Marketing group, added, “We are very excited by the depth and talent within the companies joining us. This acquisition brings to IPMG an expanded range of services including: hosting and infrastructure; online advertising management; website strategy, design and build; email and mobile marketing; performance marketing; digital PR expertise; and website analytics.

Keeping the Focus on Customer Service

Frank Boffa has recently joined BlueCentral to manage the Customer Service and Customer Assurance operations of the business. Frank has joined BlueCentral having worked for many large corporate organisations including Telstra and brings a wealth of experience to the business.

For more information about BlueCentral's Managed Hosting and Mobility services contact us on 1300 258 323 or complete the enquiry form to your right and one of our service consultants will contact you shortly.