With a 20-year history, One New Zealand (NZ) is one of New Zealand’s leading digital services and connectivity providers, delivering broadband, mobile and other related services to 2 million customers across more than 99% of the country.
As part of its evolution into a more digitally enabled, AI-driven organization, ONE NZ is pursuing a transformation strategy that balances innovation with the operational discipline required to run mission-critical systems at scale.
“We’re a telco with great ambition,” said Adrian Albuquerque, CIO of One NZ. “Our goal is to provide the best digital experiences for Kiwis and visitors to New Zealand. We’re always pushing the boundaries and taking on new technologies, and that ambition drives everything we do.”
Stabilizing Oracle systems while powering transformation
At the center of One NZ’s transformation journey is a complex Oracle estate that underpins core customer-facing and back-end operations, including Siebel CRM, Oracle Database and other Oracle applications.
As Albuquerque planned for modernization and AI-driven innovation, maintaining security, stability and reliability across these systems was non-negotiable.
Based on prior experience, Rimini Street was the natural choice.
“I’ve had great success with Rimini Street in a previous organization, and when it came time to find a partner to support our Oracle systems, they were the first call I made,” said Albuquerque. “While it’s a shift for the team to move away from the OEM (original equipment manufacturer) support, once the team saw how well Rimini Street performed and how much more free time they had to focus on higher value projects, it was an easy decision to expand the partnership and move the rest of the services to Rimini Street.”
Deep Oracle expertise spans across the One NZ IT ecosystem
Today, One NZ relies on Rimini Support™ for Oracle to maintain and optimize its core back-end platforms spanning application, database and infrastructure layers. “They’ve helped us not only secure, stabilize and operationalize our existing platforms, but also tackle some of the harder challenesg like lifecycle management and capacity constraints,” Albuquerque shared. “What differentiates Rimini Street is the depth of expertise. They bring a level of experience and speed that you simply don’t find with the software vendor, and that’s been invaluable.”
That depth of expertise proved critical when Microsoft announced the sunset of Internet Explorer 11, a browser required to run One NZ’s Siebel CRM.
“We were facing a critical decision on how to move forward,” Albuquerque said. “Upgrading the application wasn’t part of our roadmap, but losing compatibility would have been a disaster.”
Rimini Connect™ for Browsers, a patented interoperability solution for browser compatibility issues, quickly provided an answer. “Rimini Connect allowed our CRM to run on any browser, whether it was Microsoft’s Edge or Google Chrome, and still provide the levels of security, reliability and supportability that we needed,” he continued. “There was a really tight timeframe, but Rimini Street delivered. That experience confirmed that Rimini Street was more than a support provider; they are our true co-innovation partner.”
Rimini Street’s role expanded further when One NZ faced capacity and scalability concerns with the hardware supporting its core billing system. “The database ran on an antiquated system, and we couldn’t get any more hardware. We had to figure out how we’re going to scale this as we grow,” he explained. Rimini Street worked with Albuquerque’s team to migrate from HP Titanium Servers to Oracle Exadata, utilizing GoldenGate and Data Guard. “Rimini Street helped us move onto the new hardware platform, taking us through the journey by helping us out with a lot of non-production trial cases that we could run with until we were comfortable enough to cut over. Rimini Street then supported us right through stabilizing it in production, and it’s running and humming just great now. It was a great effort from the Rimini Street team.”
Freeing resources to power an AI-driven future
With critical systems stabilized, time and resource-straining upgrades no longer an issue, One NZ was able to redirect both funding and internal talent towards accelerating its transformation vision.
“With Rimini Street providing expert support for our Oracle systems, they’ve freed up my team to focus on new skills, new technologies and new opportunities, like opening a satellite service with SpaceX, for example,” said Albuquerque.
Powerful partnership accelerates transformation
For Albuquerque, the partnership delivers not just operational confidence, but also strategic foresight.
“As a CIO, I have to think years ahead,” he reflected. “Knowing where we sit three years down the road, and the amount of funding we’ve saved by switching to Rimini Street, has allowed us to unlock a whole new set of innovation opportunities.”
That foresight combined with Rimini Street’s expertise and guidance are critical as One NZ pursues its transformation goals. Albuquerque shares, “Defining our transformation program was really the shift for us. Rimini Street has been able to take us through a lot of parts that I otherwise would not have had support to do. The fact that I have a trusted partner to go to and ask, ‘what do I do in this case?’ and for them to come up with viable solutions really changes things. That’s what makes this partnership powerful.”
By strengthening its core systems and embracing a co-innovation mindset, the New Zealand telco is preparing for an AI-enabled future with confidence. One NZ’s experience demonstrates how the right partnership can transform operational challenges into strategic advantages. With Rimini Street, the organization gains both stability today and the freedom to innovate tomorrow.
Albuquerque sums it up, “It’s about knowing you have a partner who can help you stay resilient, reliable and secure while freeing your people to focus on the future. That’s what Rimini Street gives us.”
As One NZ accelerates its transformation journey, AI and automation sit at the heart of its transformation vision.
“At One NZ, we want to be the number one AI-enabled telco, not just in New Zealand, but in the world,” Albuquerque said. “From the service assurance side, we’re thinking about how to leverage the AI to eliminate manual work and swivel chairing, keep our systems more stable and evolve our software engineering processes. We’re looking forward to working with Rimini Street to explore what an agentic future looks like for us.”
Our solutions for One NZ
Receive comprehensive enterprise software support from a proven provider. Whether you need issue resolution, performance tuning or regulatory compliance, you can trust Rimini Support™ to deliver.
With Rimini Support, you gain:
- Support for customizations not covered by the vendor
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Eliminate interoperability issues while modernizing your IT environment. Future-proof your enterprise software with Rimini Connect™ and have the freedom to use any technology with it.
With Rimini Connect, you gain:
- Connectivity and interoperability solutions on existing systems
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- Accelerated IT modernization without resource-consuming regression testing and upgrade cycles
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