Twenty Years in the Making
Compucon New Zealand started life in 1992 in the PC industry. The PC making business reached the peak in Year 2000 when the Y2K bug threatened serious organizations across the world to upgrade their PCs and servers prior to the date change which old computers might produce Year 1900 instead of Year 2000 after the Year 1999 ended. Decline of business started shortly following the upgrade rush. The decline was determined to be market structural. PC was no longer a new technology. The situation prompted the company to jump into a mentor role for the University of Auckland as a means of research and development.
- 1992 – Compucon PC started up in Auckland.
- 2000 – Y2K bug as an event signified the end of PC as new technology.
- 2002 – Mentoring of university students started.
The mentoring effort produced the first fruit from a project on LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) in 2002 when 2 of the students in the Compucon led project group graduated with first class honours. Compucon subsequently produced a PC/ LAMP-based Internet Firewall Gateway.
A further opportunity knocked our door when the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment qualified Compucon in 2013 to be a founding member of New Zealand Alliance together with AUT, University of Auckland, and Massey University. The Alliance represented New Zealand in SKA which is an international space telescope project (www.skatelescope.org). High performance computing skills were essential to convert radio data from the sky into legible sky images. We were doing very well until the New Zealand Government decided to pull out of SKA in 2019.
The author got invited by Dr Radu Nicolescu to be an Official PhD Adviser for the Computer Science School of the University of Auckland. Alex Henderson, then a PhD student, completed his thesis in water computing for a PhD degree in 2022.
- 2013 – SKA: Computing for Central Signal Processor & Science Data Processor
- 2019 – UOA: An official PhD Advisor in the Computer Science School
The author has a background working in the electricity generation and supply industry for 6 years on SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition). Now 30 years later, what have changed? A SCADA system might cost $6 million back then and it can be built for a fraction of the price now. Armed with this insight, Compucon entered Digital SCADA business in 2020.
Compucon successfully applied the SCADA concept and installed video surveillance and access control in 5 project sites in Auckland including a big video surveillance site with nearly 200 cameras in 2021. The author has since been appointed a consulting engineer for a to-be-constructed building site, an existing to-be-renovated site, and an existing operating site for digital infrastructure.
- 2021 – IP video surveillance (first site started in 2008)
- 2022 – IP access control
- 2023 – IP indoor air quality and public addressing (not yet released)
- 2024 – IP power and water metering (not yet released)
Compucon Business Division
The original Compucon PC business is still on-going without an end in sight, and it needs to be. PC has an important role of supporting Internet Protocol based digital applications for operating building facilities.
While Compucon makes PC that is for general purposes, Compucon Systems Division makes PC that is specific for building facilities. This relationship is critical for the new business to implement building facility systems in seven initial (7) sites over the 2 years of 2021 and 2022.
One of the sites is large. It is a residential complex with about 700 apartments located in Newmarket. This company has installed close to 200 video surveillance cameras in this complex to protect the people and asset. An arson incident took place in 2023-04. The cameras captured a lot of key information (when and who ignited the fire) as revealed by the media.
Two other sites are also residential complexes but smaller. This company has installed a combination of video surveillance cameras and car park entrance gate remote control for them. Each gate opening event was recorded with the vehicle entering including its registered license plate number. This capability has obtained a lot of appreciations for the effectiveness in security.
So far so good on the technology management side. On the market side, the customer spaces are different. This understanding led to the establishment of an Advisory Panel for guiding the new business.
Advisors
New thinking is needed, or to be exact, different thinking is needed. As such, a virtual advisory panel has been in operation since July 2023. Their profiles can be obtained from LinkedIn.
Maurício Vás : Maurício is a very accomplished project and operations manager. Maurício started out in industrial automation (Robotics) spending much of his working life in various parts of the globe including UK, USA, China, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, India, Brazil, Argentina, Portugal, Australia and in New Zealand.
Keith Fisk : Keith is a life member of IEEE and is based in Wellington. He is among the best engineers for designing supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems in the electricity industry. He and TN were involved in Trans Power’s Fast Reacting Emergency Load Dumping system (FRED) in the nineties.
TN Chan : TN is an engineer by training. He is the founder and director of Compucon New Zealand. TN is mostly involved in technology appraisal.