VHA CTO resigns

Vodafone Hutchison Australia is set to lose its chief technology officer Andy Reeves shortly, with the mobile telco confirming this morning that the executive had resigned his post.

"I can confirm that he has tendered his resignation," VHA spokesperson Greg Spears said this morning following a report by the AustralianIT. "The date of his departure is as yet unspecified, as he wants to oversee a number of projects underway at the moment. We're conducting an internal and external search for his replacement."

Reeves is a long-time Vodafone loyalist, having originally joined the company in 1987 in the UK. He was then seconded in 1993 to the company's Australian branch with its entry into the slowly deregulating market down under.

Since mid-2002 Reeves has been Vodafone Australia's chief technology officer. With the merger of Vodafone with rival mobile telco Hutchison over the past several years, Reeves took on the CTO role at the larger entity.

Spears said the executive did not have another role to go to; he had left VHA "on good terms" in order to spend more time with his family.

At VHA, Reeves has overarching responsibility for the telco's networks and technology operations. Currently, he is overseeing several of Australia's largest technology integration projects stemming from the Vodafone/Hutchison merger.

For example, in May, VHA inked a giant network management contract expected to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars with Nokia Siemens Networks, under which the various networks of Vodafone and Hutchison will be tied together. Rival bidder Ericsson, however, won another contract with VHA in July to build a nationwide transmission network.

Billing platforms, underlying infrastructure, networks: the integration of the two mobile telcos has it all. "We've still got work to do on the integration of a lot of our IT and networks; there's some fairly big projects going on there," said Spears this morning.