News & Updates - Costs Down Revenue Up

The Rust Report: CIO Challenges

Mon, 20 May 2013 00:00:00 -1000

CIO Challenges

Achieving and sustaining success in the current environment of unprecedented marketplace innovation means CIOs being constantly alert to new and exciting trends that provide business and technological opportunities, whist under budget constraints.

Click here to view the full report

The Rust Report: Supporting Aussie ICT battlers

Mon, 13 May 2013 00:00:00 -1000

Are you the CEO of an Australian owned software or IT Services company punching above your weight? Are you battling to carve out your fair share of the local or overseas markets? We want to hear from you and to meet up when possible.

Click here to view the full report

The Rust Report: Change or be left behind

Mon, 06 May 2013 00:00:00 -1000

These days it’s hard to have a conversation that doesn’t eventually role out around the state of the economy and what’s the likely effect on the Australia ICT industry. What’s amazing is that at this point we’ve stopped bothering with words like ‘bad’ ‘down’ and ‘tough’.

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The Rust Report: Older players compete - changing directions

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -1000

The latest quarterly results underscore the uphill battle hardware, software and services vendors are currently facing catering to a new generation of consumers whose first device is often a smartphone or a tablet. Vendors are now reviewing their businesses to determine where they need to align investments based on the changing marketplace...

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A strategic Sourcing Partnership with APA Group

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -1000

….CDRU Delivering it's Promise

Challange:

APA Group (APA) is Australia’s largest natural gas infrastructure business, owning and/or operating approximately $12 billion of energy infrastructure assets.

To support APA’s business a strategic ICT initiative was undertaken to begin a path of understanding expenditure levels in Telecommunications and looking at optimisation of this core category.

Solution:

Cost Down Revenue Up Pty Limited ‘CDRU’ was selected as the strategic sourcing partner to support this initiative. The CDRU people, sourcing process and telecommunications bill analysis tools were collectively brought together to implement strategic sourcing assignments. The CDRU process known as the USP (Understanding, Solutioning, Proposing) process mapped out very clearly, and in practical steps what had to be done over a 6 month period, with an additional 3 months to finalise contracts and initiate vendor transition.

Phase 1: The Understanding process took a forensic approach to Telecommunications services across what is a large scale, distributed and in many cases remote network service footprint. A Total Cost of Ownership ‘TCO’ view produced of an annual expenditure baseline, including all hidden costs and justified future ICT investments and upgrades.

Phase 2: The Solutioning process identified two main areas of focus. IT infrastructure in relation to Data Centres (Co-Location services) and Telecommunications across all SCADA, Corporate Data, Fixed Voice, Satellite and Mobile Networks.

Phase 3: The Proposing process, included a final ‘Best and Final Offer’ process, detailing supplier due diligence and financial business sensitivity modelling with two supplier options compared on an ‘apples-for-apples’ basis against pre-determined client evaluation criteria. CDRU then made a board level recommendation to APA Group, which was accepted.

Results:

The first step was CDRU providing a detailed ICT service cost/value baseline and mapped out high level Future Telecommunications Organisational needs. This involved CDRU projecting savings based on its extensive market benchmarks. This set a very valuable strategic and tactical agenda for which areas of ICT needed both investment and also a cost focus. The strategic agenda included CDRU ‘outcome’ certainty from the outset to ensure sourcing risk was minimal, timeframes were compressed and early benefit realisation was achieved.

The benefits of the CDRU ‘USP’ sourcing process can be summarised below:

Significant network improvements, with single points of failure removed, improved Quality of Service, better quality and increased bandwidth across key sites
Double Digit operational cost reduction, year one and beyond
CDRU achieved 160% of the savings target set at the initiation of the engagement
Additional funds are now available for future strategic enablement projects, such as increased mobility initiatives and video conferencing.

In addition to the tangible savings, the USP process improved the ongoing supplier vendor management through more flexible contracts and better service levels. CDRU was also selected as the partner to assist APA Group to manage the transition of the SCADA, Corporate Data Networks, mobiles and all fixed voce services to Telstra. CDRU were able to fix the schedule, price and deliverables for supplier transition, lowering the risk of benefit capture.

CDRU not only specialises in strategic sourcing and achieving predictable technical, business and financial outcomes but also implementing supplier transition and ongoing vendor management services.

“We appointed CDRU as our strategic sourcing partner across Information Technology and Telecommunications, with an APA ‘option’ to move into supplier transition, should sourcing meet its stated outcomes. Their fees were aligned to agreed timeframes and generating real savings, whilst building new strategic networks for us” says APA’s General Manager Group IT Bill Fazl.

“During 2013 we continue to work with CDRU in the transition to our new networks, measuring the projected benefits at each stage of this strategic program”.

From the outset, the APA engagement was planned strategically and with early clarity both parties have benefited strategically. This is best described as initial strategy, sourcing, vendor transition and ongoing vendor management outlined with contracted outcomes agreed at the outset. “Our business model continues to create value for our clients, and allows CDRU to partner as a trusted buy-side advisor’” says Ian Woollett, Managing Director of CDRU.

The Australian Financil Review announces "CDRU makes the 2013 BRW top 100 Fast Starters List"

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -1000

Costs Down Revenue Up has, for the 3rd year in a row, achieved the 2013 BRW top 100 Fast Starter’s List. On the 24th April it was announced that we placed 30th.

This is without doubt an excellent accomplishment for Costs Down Revenue Up and one the team are genuinely proud of!

A Strategic Sourcing Partnership with InvoCare Ltd

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -1000

InvoCare Limited owns and operates close to 300 funeral homes, cemeteries and crematoria throughout Australia, New Zealand and Singapore and employs 1,600 staff. The company operates funeral homes under household names such as White Lady Funerals and Simplicity Funerals, among others. In an age of social media and online interaction, the funeral industry faces the challenge of being innovative whilst retaining the personal touch and a high level of dignified interaction with its clients during their most vulnerable time.

As the APAC market-leading funeral services provider, InvoCare has taken the lead in introducing a new way of interacting with its customers and the friends and family of the deceased by implementing a customer-centric ‘Digital Business’ strategy and capabilities. This includes digital channels to market, customer-centric digital tools, social media and the digital enablement of funeral homes, cemeteries and crematoria.

Traditionally, for an organisation such as InvoCare, technology expenditure is not a core business function and is generally viewed as a business cost. With digital moving more to the centre of doing business however, technology spend is now thrust to the forefront as part of growing both the top and the bottom-line. In this context, InvoCare pursued a Strategic Sourcing initiative aimed at realising tangible cost savings to support the implementation of its Digital Business strategy.

Click here to view the full report

Cost Down Revenue Up's Managing Director's LinkedIn profile is one of the top 5% most viewed for 2012

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -1000

Ian Woollett's profile is ranked in the top 5% most viewed profiles for 2012.

Click here to see the announcement.

Click here to view Ian's LinkedIn profile.

Telstra pins hopes on cloud

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -1000

Telstra pins hopes on cloud after posting $1.6bn half-year profit

Braces for spectrum licence costs in the year ahead

Telstra chief David Thodey says cloud computing is no longer a “glean in our eye” but a critical part of the telco’s business as it invests in new data centres to build on its existing capability.

“We now have 16,000 cloud customers and we’ve had over 3000 join us in the last six months,” Thodey told shareholders, after Telstra posted a $1.6 billion half-year profit.

Revenue from cloud services grew by 25 percent during the half, albeit from a low base.

Telstra flagged significant costs ahead for existing and new spectrum licences, excluding the cost of purchasing new spectrum from its guidance of single low digit income growth for the year.

Despite acknowledging that the impact of the National Broadband Network on its fixed business was not significant, Telstra saw $176 million in revenue from NBN agreements.

Telstra's financial results continued to be dragged down by the group’s digital media business, which includes the ailing Sensis business that saw a revenue fall of 12.5 percent during the half.

Digital media revenue declined by seven percent, as Telstra was unable to grow its digital revenues quickly enough to stem print revenue losses.

Thodey said the telco’s investment in its mobile network was paying off by attracting more customers.

“We have now sold 1.5 million 4G devices and we are on track to expand 4G coverage to 66 percent of the Australian population by June 2013,” Thodey said in a statement.

Mobile revenue grew by 4.6 percent to $4.5 billion, with more than 600,000 new domestic customers acquired during the half.

Fixed line revenue continued its decline, with growth in fixed broadband not enough to offset the decline in PSTN revenue.

The telco continued to improve on customer service measures, with complaints about it to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman declining by 10 percent during the year.

Thodey today focused on improvements the telco had made to its online service capability, revealing there were now 150,000 live customer service chats taking place each month, and two million visitors to its crowd support site.

Thodey also flagged work that is being done to better address the needs of mobile data customers travelling overseas, who he admitted were often ending up with bill shock.

“The expectations of people are enormous in terms of using tablets when they travel now,” Thodey said.

“It’s a tough one but I think we’ve got some ideas going forward that will address that.”

CDRU has full accreditation rights under the NSW Government's New Pre-qualification Scheme

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 00:00:00 -1000

As of the 12th December 2012, CDRU has been officially recognised with full accreditation rights under the NSW Government’s new pre-qualification scheme relating to all NSW Government Information and Communication Technology (ICT) requirements. This formal accreditation now allows CDRU to provide their unique and highly successful consulting services to all NSW Government Departments and Agencies in regards to the evaluation, sourcing and delivery of all their ICT requirements. Given the future challenges that lie ahead for most NSW Government Agencies in regards to their ICT structure, services and costs, this is seen as an important announcement given CDRU’s successful track record within the commercial sector. Although CDRU is a private and completely independent organisation, it has built up an extensive and detailed knowledge of all major Tier 1 and Tier 2 ICT service providers and their respective solutions and products within the Australian marketplace. This has enabled CDRU to define, source and deliver some very smart solutions to some major corporate clients and with significant ICT cost reductions and service improvement. The expectation will be for CDRU to provide similar cost and service benefits into NSW Government.

Click here to view the letter of accreditation

About CDRU

CDRU is a well established and highly specialised outcomes-based consulting company with a highly successful approach and methodology in helping clients achieve their ICT objectives and outcomes (both financial and services). CDRU is all about defining and executing clients best options around their ICT strategy, infrastructure and operations and this is backed by a very comprehensive suite of consulting services ranging from ICT Strategy and Technical Architecture through to Requirements Definition, Solutioning, Business Case, Sourcing, Contracting, Transition and ultimately, Transformation. All of these services are provided across the big 3 towers of Telecommunications, IT Infrastructure and Software. Also, CDRU is one of very few consulting firms in Australia to provide clients with the option of a simple and practical Risk / Reward Pricing Model whereby their fixed price fees are conditional on the achievement of agreed financial and service outcomes. CDRU has been very successful with this approach with major ASX based clients and as a result, has an excellent reference base.

About NSW Government Accreditation Program

The NSW Government provides strict guidelines for all Departments and Agencies in procuring ICT products or services. Only pre-accredited organisations listed on the 2020 Panel Contract can sell their products or services to any NSW Government Department or Agency. This framework of pre-approved and fully accredited organisations also sets out the standard terms, conditions and pricing governing all commercial transactions with any NSW Government organisation.