Vocus creates CIO role

Len Walter, formerly Soul/TPG's head of IP operations, has moved into the newly-created chief information officer role at Vocus Communications.

Walter joined the voice and IP transit wholesaler three weeks ago. He said its rapid growth meant "there was a lot to get across" quickly.

Vocus chief executive officer and founder James Spenceley said that before the creation of the CIO role Vocus had "ad hoc groups" overseeing projects.

"We've grown so fast that we needed a more structured approach to managing our systems and projects," Spenceley said.

Apart from adding robustness to Vocus' IT systems, Walter will spearhead projects including the development of a portal to allow wholesale customers to track their use of IP transit services.

The portal is in testing with three customers and would be ready before the end of the year.

"We feel that wholesale telecommunications has been the ugly stepchild of the industry," Spenceley said.

"We want to bring to wholesale a lot of the features and functionality that the retail industry has provided for a long time and give customers a lot more visibility over their service and interactions with us."

Walter will also manage the launch of a distributed "burstable" IP transit port product. A burstable service lets customers sign on to use less bandwidth than a cable's capacity, with an option to ‘burst' over the contracted level and use up to the full cable capacity if they need it.

A formal announcement of the service was expected in the coming months.

Spenceley said it would provide customers with a single bill for their aggregated use of multiple ports in different cities or countries.

Vocus recently completed a $2 million refresh of its core network that increased link capacities from one to 10 Gigabits.

It has about 100 customers including TransACT and AussieHQ.