This morning, thieves ram-raided the Spark Ponsonby store with a car and stole a number of mobile devices. This robbery follows a previous ram-raid on the same store a few months ago.All the stolen devices taken this morning and in the p…

Spark will use UnisonFibre to connect new customers to Spark fibre broadband, in areas covered by the UnisonFibre network. UnisonFibre has an extensive fibre network, with more than 700kms of cabling reaching nearly 13,000 homes and…

Contact Energy is now running its entire business ‘from the cloud’, after completing a large scale migration to Spark’s cloud services late last year.With millions of customer records to be considered, Spark partnered w…

New Zealand businesses people have a couple of new online destinations for resources, with the launch of two new websites by Spark.The digital services company is evolving its Spark Lab events series into a multi-platform thought leaders…

Capping two years of partnership and just in time for the bumper betting summer season, Spark have helped the New Zealand Racing Board (NZRB) successfully complete the major phase of a two-part data centre migration overnight on 12 Decem…

New Zealand’s services sector experienced further expansion during December to round out a solid year of activity, according to the BNZ – BusinessNZ Performance of Services Index (PSI).
 
The PSI for December was 58.4.  This was 0.3 points up from November, and the highest result for 2016 (A PSI reading above 50.0 indicates that the service sector is generally expanding; below 50.0 that it is declining).
 
BusinessNZ chief executive Kirk Hope said that 2016 ended off on a high note, with both production/sales (63.5) and new orders/business (60.9) remaining about the 60-point mark. 

“The average activity result for 2016 was 56.6.  While this was slightly down on the 57.8 recorded for 2015, it was still the third highest average yearly result since the survey began.”
 
BNZ Senior Economist Craig Ebert said that “unlike its PMI cousin, the PSI’s new orders/business index remained clearly above normal.  This heralds sustained strong expansion in sales activity, which was already pumping in December “.
 
View PSI Time Series Data

Services Landscape
 
The PSI
New Zealand’s Performance of Services Index (PSI) maintained a perky pace in December, with an index reading of 58.4.
Read more  → 
 
QSBO Services
That the services sector continues to barrel along rather well was also in evident in last week’s Quarterly Survey of Business Opinion (QSBO).
Read more  → 
 
Retail
One of the question marks we have around the services sector is the performance of the retail sector.  We say this with December’s electronic card transactions having failed to bounce back from their November dip, capping our expectations around Q4 retail volume growth.
Read more  → 
 
Employment
One of the factors supporting consumer spending, of course, is the labour market.  Today’s PSI still has good news re the latter.
Read more  → 
 
View full BNZ Services Landscape 

Auckland Chamber launches confidential service to ensure employers meet New Zealand wage regulations.Increasing numbers of migrants and younger workers being taken advantage of by employers; notes Auckland Chamber head Michael …

Momentum Life, a New Zealand life insurance company, announced today its partnership with Heart Kids, the only charity in New Zealand dedicated to providing lifelong care and support to children and families living with Childhood Heart D…

New Zealand cloud software start-up Datagate Innovation Limited has appointed Arron Patterson – Dell EMC Chief Technology Officer for Asia Pacific and Japan, and start-up investor/mentor – as a Non-Executive Director.
 
For customers including a network of Spark resellers and one of New Zealand’s largest IT services companies, Datagate’s cloud billing solution provides online billing, reporting and customer self-service for usage-based services.
 
Arron Patterson joins BankLink founder Malcolm McDonald on the Datagate board. Mr Patterson has also invested in Datagate through investment group Flying Kiwi Angels. In his role as investor, advisor and mentor for Flying Kiwi Angels Patterson routinely sees presentations from six different start-ups and start-up ideas each week. He says Datagate ‘stood out from the pack.’
 
“I was impressed by CEO Mark Loveys’ track record of creating shareholder value and with the quality of the team around him,” Arron Patterson says.
 
“Datagate’s product is also pretty mature and it has happy customers. The foundations are in place for the company to grow in scale. Part of my regional CTO role is to evaluate the cloud IT service provider market. One of the persistent challenges for these organisations is the need to carve up a service stream and give it to multiple metered customers. Datagate’s value is that it can bill, rate and present virtually any service that is subscription or usage-based. Metered billing continues to be an issue for managed service providers the world over, which is why Datagate has global growth potential. This is a start-up that has successfully solved a difficult issue for many utility and telco customers. Cloud IT service providers are the next logical target.”
 
CEO Mark Loveys says Arron Patterson’s expertise in managed service provisioning, and his global business connections, are valuable for both customer acquisition and strategic planning. 
 
“Arron lives and breathes the large IT service provider market, which is one of Datagate’s biggest market opportunities,” he says.
 
“These are highly strategic customers because they generate new ‘white label’ opportunities for Datagate within their own reseller and customer communities. This grows annualised revenue. It’s a dynamic that has seen Datagate almost triple customer numbers and contracted annualised revenue in the last twelve months,” Mark Loveys says.
 
Formerly a wholly-owned division of NZAX-listed Enprise Group (ENS), in 2015 Datagate was established as a joint venture between Enprise Group and new investors, including the Ice Angels, VIF, Flying Kiwi Angels and Datagate management. First round seed funding of $1.46 million was raised and a separate board established, BankLink founder Malcolm McDonald joined the board as a director and Enprise CEO and co-founder Mark Loveys was appointed CEO.