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NTT Com Australia reorganises Frontline and Harbour MSP

Consolidates Frontline Systems and Harbour MSP, resulting in 47 redundancies

NTT Communications Australia is reorganising its business model, consolidating the operations of two majority-owned entities, Frontline Systems and subsidiary Harbour MSP.

As a result, 47 roles across Australia will be made redundant as its engineering, product, sales and back office functions are integrated.

Frontline Systems COO, Monte Davis, said it was hard to lose colleagues, but the restructure will allow it to scale for success, continuing to invest in infrastructure resale and network services, but also ensuring its well-positioned for growing opportunities in enterprise services, right across the deployment, management and maintenance of IT systems in and outside the data centre environment.

“However, even as we look forward, we are delighted that Frontline founder Steve Murphy has extended his commitment to the organisation, given he has been so critical to its success since the outset,” Davis said.

NTT acquired majority shares in Frontline in May 2011, and during the past two years has invested $100 million across all three brands.

"Since NTT bought Frontline two years ago, we've been operating as three seperate trading entities,"Davis said. "We have five offices in Sydney and three in Melbourne. We have eight seperate sales teams, and redundancies was the first step in organising in becoming one team with one budget and one organisational sales structure.

"We have such a rich offering across the three companies that we were just failing miserably to tap those assets and deliver a full end-to-end solution. The idea was always to integrate the three organisations into one team."

A part of the reorganisation also involves a pipeline of re-investment to focus on boosting customer support and services, bringing staff together across the three organisations to provide customers with one-stop solutions for networks, infrastructure, colocation and cloud provisioning.

It plans to reinvest a further $15 million into the business during the next six months with a clearly defined product and partnership roadmap.

The six-month transformation includes new premises in Sydney and Melbourne CBD, as well as early-stage planning for a potential deployment of new network and data centre services in Canberra.

It also plans to target areas of growing demand such as security, and will also keep its customer-facing resourcing under close review, with plans to invest in new roles and skills.

“While today my thoughts and thanks are with the departing teams, at the same time I know we are implementing changes that will create the streamlined ‘one company’ approach our customers want,” Founder and managing director of Frontline, Steve Murphy, said.

“Looking back at the past 22 years of Frontline’s history I am proud of what we have achieved, particularly over the last 24 months as we’ve started to unlock the real benefits of the combined strengths of NTT Australia, Frontline and Harbour MSP.”

A company rebranding exercise will be taking place in about November, Murphy said.

"Coming up with the right branding and name is a different issue, and we've got to make sure we go through all the right processes there," he said.

Murphy has expanded his shareholding of the company, and is eager to see this reorganisation through.

"I really want to see this through and to become the powerhouse that we intended to be," he said.

NTT Com senior vice-president of global business division, Katsumi Nakata, said in the coming months it will be announcing a range of new, high-value joint ventures that utilise the reach of NTT Com and will continue to expand its footprint.

“Australia remains a key growth market for us and we look forward to working closely with the management team,” Nakata said.