Integration and Services: Opinions

It's one of the oldest rumours still flying around the local IT industry, but stagnant product sales in the first half of Dimension Data Australia's financial year will once again have people asking whether the integrator will offload distribution arm, Express Data.

Last week saw the Federal Government extend the tender deadline for a $4.7 billion national broadband network (NBN). You can bet this won't be the last delay in what is likely to be a very lengthy process.

How many heads will roll at EDS? That's the obvious question, now that Hewlett-Packard is buying the company. A back-of-the-envelope calculation says that at least half the employees of HP+EDS are in services, but they generate only one-third of the revenue. Conclusion: Up to 50 per cent of them will get the chop.

As a channel consultant, I meet many partners (resellers, integrators or VARs) and I am keen to understand what they do. More often than not, their answer is a derivative of:

As the role of the CIO within the organisation evolves, so does the support the CIO needs from IT vendors and channel partners.

What will your IT department look like in, say, five years? This is an important question, because we're at the beginning of an array of major changes in the how, where and why IT is done.

To say it's been a challenging six months for Australia's largest distributor is an understatement. On the forefront of a downturn in the general IT economy, Tech Pacific appeared plagued by a lack of direction and bad management decisions.