Watch this short video interview with Stephen Haddad where he spoke about their partnership with AC3 and HPE and how it helped them modernise their environment, reduce downtime and improve ways of working.
Watch this short video interview with Stephen Haddad where he spoke about their partnership with AC3 and HPE and how it helped them modernise their environment, reduce downtime and improve ways of working.
If you live in Australia the chances are SCA will touch your life in one way or another. And very likely every day. SCA is how the people in this huge entertainment company refer to Southern Cross Austereo, the umbrella group that was formed in July 2011 following the merger of the Southern Cross Media and Austereo Groups. SCA owns a broadcast radio, television and digital network that includes 86 radio stations. It also broadcasts 92 free-to-air TV signals across the country with the Nine Network, the Seven Network and Network Ten’s programming.
Then there is the wide array of social media, live events, video, online, podcasts via PodcastOne Australia and mobile assets that the company produces every day. It’s a formidable output and the role of SCA’s Chief Technology Officer is a considerable one.
That role has been the responsibility of Stephen Haddad, a highly experienced CIO/CTO and business transformation expert who has spent many years working across various industries and has extensive experience in the Australian media landscape.
Starting out as a developer in banking and finance, Haddad progressed to team leadership roles and his first CIO role before joining Bauer Media as CIO and now as CTO of SCA.
At SCA he is now responsible for the IT teams, the Digital Technology teams and Broadcasting Technology teams across both Audio and TV. “As part of this role, we’re responsible for looking after our back office systems for content, advertising and other facets of the business, which includes ad booking systems and IT systems for finance,” says Haddad.
SCA has a number of different approaches to technology depending on which stream of the business is involved, but reliability, stability and simplification are central requirements across the board, he explains.
“For our internal stakeholders, our approach towards technology is to ensure that our staff are enabled to work anywhere in the most convenient ways with the most modern tools.”
“In terms of our external view of what technology does for our business, we want to have the best digital assets and the best digital presence of a media organisation in the market. That’s demonstrated through our mobile apps, websites and our smart speaker presence.
“In terms of our broadcasting capability, we obviously want to have reliability and consistency in the way that we broadcast to ensure that we’re able to reach the largest number of people we can.”
Understandably, when he took over the role there were myriad systems and legacy technologies in place that needed to be overhauled and re-evaluated. But with over 20 years’ experience in defining future-state operating models and leading business transformations across complex multilocation structures, Haddad was the right fit to spearhead the organisation’s technological restructure.
He thrives in a challenging environment, he says. “As a leader, I encourage teams to challenge the ‘way they’ve always done things’,” he says.
And at SCA the way things had always been done meant that the company was faced with a number of core challenges in its technical operations.
“The three predominant challenges we faced began with our technical debt and the underinvestment and disparate technologies from a variety of providers,” explains Haddad.
“Second, there were a number of challenges surrounding our ability to converge our traditional IT teams with our traditional engineering and broadcasting teams.
“The third challenge was around the ability to maintain and attract specialised technical skills in areas where we may not have historically had technologies or operated in,” says Haddad.
For a three-part challenge, it was fitting that SCA approached it with a three-part response. The three-part, or more accurately three-party, response comprised an alignment between SCA, AC3 and HPE. “This partnership came about as a result of a process we ran in the market a couple of years ago,” recalls Haddad. “We had looked at a number of partners supporting HPE in the marketplace and we selected AC3 as our primary partner. We had a long relationship with HPE and believed that HPE was able to support us ongoing due to its continued innovation in the technology space.
“HPE played the role of working with our internal architects to look through our corporate strategy and find technical solutions that enabled us to deliver on that strategy.”
To extend the relationship to AC3 was a natural fit, says Haddad.
“AC3, as a partner of HPE, had also already done some significant work for us and had a very detailed understanding of the complexities of our business, which has more than 55 different offices – all of which have infrastructure and technical support requirements.
“AC3 played the role of augmenting our staff and supporting us in deeply technical areas in which our teams had neither the expertise or the experience to deliver the required solutions.”
Haddad describes how these solutions were executed by SCA first engaging HPE to design the technical response to problems before engaging AC3 to work with SCA’s internal staff, architects and technical team to deliver the proposed solution. “They’ve assisted us and supported us every step of the way in both design and implementation,” stresses Haddad.
What this three-party response meant for SCA was a vast improvement in its technical operations. “The results were a less complex, modernised footprint across our organisation,” says Haddad, “which has really provided us with an increased amount of stability and a reduction in the number of [adverse] incidences we experience.”
One of the primary solutions implemented by the partnership was an improved back-up system, which replaced the legacy solution for tape back-ups. The previous system regularly failed and required significant human interaction, says Haddad. “We designed our storage strategy with a view to replacing our complex 3Par platform with Nimble. Nimble was better suited to our performance requirements, scaling with us as demand increased and reducing our technical support and configuration overheads thanks to the predictive analytics.
“But now with a modern and fit-for-purpose solution, which is scalable and highly reliable, this has reduced our risk in a highly extensible solution to reduce the time and effort required to support it.” The less complex footprint has had immediate and tangible results. “We’ve had a 26 percent reduction in incidences,” notes Haddad. “We’ve reduced our risk and removed tens of hours of manual labour. We now also have a well-defined and simpler partner and vendor landscape.”
The three-way relationship with HPE and AC3 has also given SCA an invaluable template for the way it does business in other areas.
“We’ve learned a lot from this partnership,” says Haddad. “We use this model of the tri-party relationship to really set a standard for the way that we deal with a number of our other service providers. Clearly, what we’ve learned is that deeper relationships result in improved technical and commercial outcomes.”
