In 2012, CeBIT will be held once again at Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre, Darling Harbour, on 22-24 May. The show will feature more than 100 conferences sessions and more than 600 exhibitions. Topics covered include: e-Government, the cloud, social media and more. Read more »
iiNet’s acquisition of Internode has caused a great deal of contention among Australian consumers, with many seeing the deal as the end of Internode's strong customer service record. But it’s too early to determine the true effect on Internode’s service and the ISP marketplace. Read more »
Craig Gibbons has led a diverse career, starting out as an Army helicopter pilot in the Australian Defence Force and going on to gigs in aerospace project management and security at the 2004 Athens Olympic Games. Merri Mack talks to Gibbons about the skills gained from a varied career and how he applies them as CIO of Fuji Xerox Australia. Read more »
Desktop virtualisation is becoming increasingly commonplace in Australian organisations. Once you’ve determined that it’s the right approach for your organisation, how do you decide what’s needed to support virtual desktops from your data centre? Stephen Withers explains. Read more »
The cloud promises to liberate organisations from the limitations of traditional IT infrastructure. Here, Oracle’s Marc Caltabiano argues that early cloud solutions have created new computing silos that actually impose new limits on organisations. He suggests that organisations must take a more nuanced view of the cloud to get the most from a cloud strategy. Read more »
Ten years ago, business intelligence (BI) solutions were only available to large organisations that could afford to spend time and money developing them in-house. With the advent of the cloud, this scenario is changing. Adam Hawkins, Co-founder and Managing Director, Mercurial, discusses the limitations of in-house business intelligence solutions, and looks at cloud-based solutions as an alternative. Read more »
The trend of employees bringing their own devices into the workplace will grow rapidly in 2012. This will create even larger stockpiles of data for IT to sift through and manage. Clive Gold*, EMC, reports on the impact of ‘the consumerisation of IT’ on big data - what he calls “the biggest opportunity of this decade” - and how organisations can best tackle it. Read more »
According to some, 2012 will bring another global economic crisis. Others predict a more literal cataclysm, involving a little fire and a lot of brimstone. Andrew Collins talks to the experts to sort the nonsense from the reality, finding out what trends and technologies will influence your IT department in the year to come. Read more »
In 2005, Grant Cresswell began as CIO of Opera Australia (OA), where he still works as a contract CIO, while also moonlighting as CIO for several not-for-profits. Here, he talks to Merri Mack about IT outsourcing, communications solutions, VoIP and life as a flexible CIO. Read more »
The company call centre was once the primary (and a private) port of call for irate or frustrated customers. Now, many are turning to social media, airing their complaints on Twitter or Facebook for the world to see. Robert Allman, of Dimension Data Australia, looks at how to build a competent CRM architecture in this age of social media, and public complaint. Read more »
Interest in metro and carrier ethernet is growing across the Asia Pacific region. Similarly, customers around the globe are looking to the cloud as a way to tackle their IT delivery. Merri Mack reports on the intersection of these two trends: the delivery of cloud services over carrier ethernet. Read more »
With the government finally putting a price on carbon, IT managers around Australia will now have to pay close attention to the efficiency of their storage arrays. Clive Gold, Vice-Chair of SNIA ANZ, explains the rationale behind the association’s new Emerald program, and how you can use it to assess the impact of the carbon price on your own equipment. Read more »
Innovation Minister Senator Kim Carr recently launched OzHub, a cloud initiative with the aim of building “Australian consumer and business confidence in cloud computing”. Merri Mack takes a closer look at OzHub and its potential impact on cloud computing in Australia. Read more »
Server virtualisation is growing ever more popular thanks to its potential to drive down costs and increase flexibility. But pre-virtualisation server performance metrics no longer apply, making any application performance problems hard to diagnose, leaving users wondering where their app went and IT with no answer. Rafi Katanasho, Compuware, explains what you can do about it. Read more »
Aggregating reams of data on your users and customers, then mining that data for business intelligence, is powerful indeed. But combining these otherwise disparate stockpiles of personal data has grave ethical implications, particularly if these datasets should ever fall into the wrong hands. Conrad Bates, from C3 Business Solutions, discusses these considerations and the need for ethics standards for information management. Read more »
In his eleven years at TechnologyOne, IT Manager Andrew Bauer has seen the IT team grow from just two members to a team that supports the company’s current staff of 850 people. Merri Mack talks to Bauer about the challenges of getting a hold of something relatively intangible - such as the cloud - and using it to create real-world benefits for the business. Read more »
Unified communications offers a tantalising mix of productivity benefits, but the cost of a full-blown enterprise-grade deployment is prohibitive to many organisations. However, with the emergence of cloud-based unified communications services, these benefits are becoming available to more and more Australian businesses, as Stephen Withers found out. Read more »
IT departments are being urged to make use of new technologies like social media, mobility, virtualisation and the cloud. Each of these carries new security risks and IT departments must learn new tactics to successfully secure them, as Merri Mack explains. Read more »
Cloud computing is often treated as something of a black box: you put data into it, some magic goes on, and processed data comes out. But even though someone else is taking care of the heavy lifting, securing your data as it goes into the cloud is still your responsibility. So says Vince Lee, Regional Manager, Australia & New Zealand, SafeNet. Read more »
Demand for data centres continues unabated, driven by factors like cloud computing and increasing use of multiapplication phones. These data centres must be efficient if they are to be successful. Jim Smith, CTO of Digital Realty Trust, discusses how power-usage planning can help build better data centres. Read more »