Available for contract · Aotearoa New Zealand & remote
I'm Fraser Marr. For 24 years I've been the person organisations call when the architecture is tangled, the platform won't scale, the integration landscape has become a spider's web, or nobody can quite explain why delivery keeps slipping. I untangle it, draw the map, and stay to make sure it actually gets built.
About
Fraser Marr Principal — Organica Communications Ltd
I started out when the state of the art was a rack you could hear from the car park. I've since spent a career in the space between the whiteboard and production — the place where architecture either earns its keep or quietly becomes shelfware.
I've held CTO and Enterprise Architect roles across energy, central and local government, health, telecommunications, media, aviation, tourism and payments — in New Zealand and in the United States. That range matters: the patterns that save a national telco are often the same ones a 40-person SaaS company needs, just sized differently. I bring the pattern, not the ceremony.
The No. 8 wire part is real. I'd rather ship something elegant and boring on Tuesday than something magnificent and theoretical next quarter. But I'm also an unapologetic perfectionist about the things that bite you later: data models, integration contracts, identity, observability, and whether anyone can actually operate the thing at 3am. Pragmatism on the surface, rigour underneath.
Organica Communications Ltd is how I contract. Engagements range from a two-week architectural review to a multi-year transformation programme as fractional CTO. If you're not sure which you need, that's usually the first thing worth working out together.
Capability
Six things I get called in for — one for each blade of the aperture, as it happens. Most engagements are two or three of them at once.
Current-state truth, target-state that survives contact with reality, and a roadmap with sequencing someone can actually fund. Capability models, domain boundaries, reference architectures and the governance to keep them alive — sized to the organisation, not to a framework's table of contents.
Executive technical leadership without the permanent headcount. I sit at the leadership table, own the technology strategy, run the engineering function, and translate honestly in both directions — board to engine room and back. Particularly useful during scale-ups, turnarounds and CTO gaps.
AWS, Azure and hybrid. Landing zones, well-architected reviews, cost that doesn't ambush the CFO, and platform engineering that makes the right thing the easy thing. I've migrated monoliths, repatriated over-engineered microservices, and told people not to move when moving was the wrong call.
The spider's web is usually the real problem. Event-driven and API-led integration, canonical models that hold up, master data that people trust, and a migration path off the point-to-point tangle that doesn't require stopping the business for a year.
Twenty-year-old systems that still run the business are not a joke — they're a constraint to be respected and then carefully dismantled. Strangler patterns, risk-first sequencing, and the unglamorous archaeology of working out what a system really does before you replace it.
An independent, plainly-worded read on whether a programme, platform or acquisition target is what it claims to be. Security and privacy posture, technical debt, delivery capability, key-person risk — and what it will realistically cost to fix.
Track record
Twenty-four years, seventeen organisations, eleven sectors — from a US telco with tens of millions of subscribers to a private aviation start-up that needed everything built twice as fast for a tenth of the money.
Energy & Utilities
Retail energy at national scale — customer platforms, billing complexity and the integration landscape that sits behind every bill.
Energy & Utilities
Critical electricity and gas distribution infrastructure — where operational technology, asset data and enterprise IT have to agree with each other.
Telecommunications · USA
Carrier-grade systems in a US national network. Scale that recalibrates your sense of what "high volume" means for the rest of your career.
Telecommunications
The challenger telco — building competitive capability quickly without inheriting the incumbent's technical debt.
Central Government
Public-sector architecture at portfolio scale — all-of-government standards, NZISM alignment and delivery under genuine public scrutiny.
Local Government
Council services for a fast-growing city — consolidating legacy systems while ratepayer-facing services stayed available throughout.
Health
Shared health IT services across multiple districts. Clinical systems, patient data and an integration estate where downtime is not an abstract risk.
Emergency Services
Ambulance and emergency response technology — dispatch, mobility and resilience engineering for systems that genuinely cannot fall over.
Health Insurance
Member-facing digital services and claims platforms, with the privacy and regulatory obligations that come with health data.
Fintech & Payments
Secure PIN-on-mobile payments. PCI DSS, cryptographic key management and certification regimes where "close enough" fails an audit.
Aviation
Private aviation operations and booking. A lean team needing enterprise-grade thinking on a start-up budget — my favourite kind of constraint.
Tourism & Transport
Global RV rental and tourism operations — multi-country, multi-brand, multi-currency systems with sharp seasonal demand curves.
Media & Broadcasting
Broadcast and streaming. Content supply chains, audience platforms and traffic patterns that spike the moment something happens in the news.
Entertainment & Gaming
Casino, hospitality and loyalty across multiple properties — heavily regulated, 24/7, with no acceptable maintenance window.
Software · Cinema Technology
A New Zealand product company running cinemas worldwide. Multi-tenant SaaS architecture and the discipline of shipping to a global install base.
SaaS · Sustainability
Carbon accounting and ESG reporting software — auditable data lineage, because a sustainability number you can't defend is worse than no number.
Education Technology
Learning platforms and education systems, where the users are students and staff — two groups with very little patience for bad software.
Company names are listed to describe the scope of my professional experience. No endorsement or ongoing relationship is implied, and all names remain the property of their respective owners.
How I work
Four stages. Each one ends with something you can act on, even if you stop there.
A conversation, no charge. What's actually hurting, who's affected, what's already been tried. I'll tell you honestly if I'm not the right person.
One to three weeks in your environment. Systems, people, decisions and data. You get a written assessment with findings and options, not a slide deck of platitudes.
Target architecture and a sequenced roadmap with costs, risks and dependencies. Written so an executive can decide from it and an engineer can build from it.
I stay. Hands-on through implementation, embedded with your team, transferring capability as we go. My exit criterion is that you don't need me.
Plain language. If I can't explain the architecture to your CFO, it isn't finished.
Written down. Decisions and their reasoning, recorded. Verbal architecture evaporates.
Boring where it counts. Novelty is a cost. I spend it deliberately, and rarely.
Operable at 3am. If it can't be run and recovered under pressure, it isn't done.
Your team, uplifted. Capability stays behind when I leave. That's the point.
Straight answers. Including the ones that cost me the next phase of work.
Contact
Tell me roughly what's going on. If there's a fit I'll come back within two working days with some initial thoughts and what an engagement might look like. If there isn't, I'll say so and point you somewhere better.