ANZ e-commerce chief goes to ASP

Former ANZ Bank e-commerce head Greg Dyer has signalled a vote of confidence in application service providers by joining ANZ subsidiary Always There as national sales director.

Dyer, a Tuanz board member, spent 12 months at ANZ and prior to that five years as general manager of global travel reservations company Galileo.

Always There, an ASP specialising in the retail sector, was formed in April 2000 by point-of-sale specialist Eftpos NZ, which is owned by ANZ. It recently signed a five-year $10 million contract with Hitachi which provides a 3000-user-capable IT platform for the retail applications it rents out on a monthly basis. These include retail management and POS system AdvanceRetail, financials software exo-net 6000, Microsoft Office 2000, Outlook/Exchange 2000, web access and CHRIS — an HR and payroll system by Auckland-based Frontier Software that is supplied via a Citrix thin client.

Always There has three multi-chain retailers using its service and is developing solutions for two more customers.

Food wholesaler Rattrays has been trialling exo-net 6000 through Always There. Next year Always There will tackle the Australian retail market, using Hitachi’s Melbourne-based data centre. Always There also supplies customer premise equipment such as cash draws, printers, PCs and Eftpos terminals.

Although companies such as Unisys and esolutions this year stopped actively chasing the ASP market, Always There managing director Martin Shelton believes specialising in one market sector makes the ASP model viable.

“So far people have offered various applications to the horizontal market but if you’re still running your own IT systems why would you want to source one part of it from a third party?” says Shelton.

“We decided to concentrate on one vertical market and offer them the whole thing from end-to-end. They no longer need an IT department.”