Bayer Rosmarin had been with Optus since March of 2019, coming primarily from a background in banking. She initially served as Deputy CEO and took the top job in April of 2020.
Bayer Rosmarin did not have any telecom experience before joining Optus, something that Chairman Paul O’Sullivan is keen to avoid when her replacement is hired.
O’Sullivan does not have the responsibility to hire a new CEO, that burden falls on Optus’ parent company Singtel, who said it had begun an international search.
“My advice would be to look externally as well as internally and look for the best possible experience,” O’Sullivan said in an interview. “I do think telco experience is very helpful in running a big telco”.
What caused the outage?
Following the outage, which occurred on 8th November, Bayer Rosmarin appeared in front of an Australian senate enquiry where she revealed the cause of the outage.
She exposed that the network issue had been caused by changes to routing information supplied from an international peering network.
“These routing information changes propagated through multiple layers in our network and exceeded preset safety levels on key routers which could not handle these. This resulted in those routers disconnecting from the Optus IP Core network to protect themselves,” Optus said in a statement.
It was later revealed the peering network in question was Singtel’s Internet Exchange (STiX), but Singtel were quick to deny responsibility.
“The STiX upgrade was completed within 20 minutes, and all its customers’ routers that were connected to it, including Optus’s, were up and running,” Optus’ parent company said, denying that the upgrade was the route cause.
Optus said solving the problem required Optus to reconnect or reboot some routers physically, requiring the dispatch of people across a number of sites in Australia. This is reportedly why the issue lasted for so long.
Was resigning the right call?
"Resigning was the right thing to do and probably good timing,” Dr Nathan Eva, associate professor in leadership at Monash Business School in Melbourne, Australia told Capacity.
“I assume that she has been able to get the internals right over the past week, deal with the Senate hearing, deal with the parent company SingTel, set up an interim, make sure her team is ok, and then step away,” Eva said.
Eva’s colleague, Dr Mariano Heyden said the firing represented a symbolic scapegoating in reaction to pressures from the general public and policy makers.
Dr Heyden, a professor of strategy and international business at Monash, said “It helps deflect blame and gives the story a human point of reference by providing a ‘villain’ scapegoat to carve out a culprit from the overall brand.”
“CEO turnover is an opportunity for the organisation's board to take accountability for misfortunes and create a context for thinking about authentic change,” he continued.
