Integration and Services: Features

2011 was a bad year for natural disasters. Several nations were rocked either by earthquakes, tidal waves, or floods. There was even a nuclear accident. But has the tumultuous year convinced businesses to bolster their disaster recovery?

Five key points CIOs should know when considering big data

One small step for man, a giant leap for robot-kind.

The two primary forms of public cloud computing, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), are both growing dramatically in popularity. Over the last few years, the primary focus of the IaaS providers has been on offering the basic compute and storage resources required to run applications.

When the global trade association SEMI experienced a big revenue decline last year and had to cut staff, CIO Gil McInnes turned to outsourcing.

Managed security services have been growing in popularity over the past several years, and the latest task enterprises are looking to offload to an outside provider is security information management.

Singtel-owned telco Optus is provide telecommunications and managed networks service to the ANZ bank under a new $500 million, five year contract.

Australian health authorities may have given the all clear for two local suspected cases of the swine flu virus -- which has killed more than 80 people in Mexico and infected 20 in the United States -- but concern over the spread of the potentially fatal disease has local CIOs revisiting their business continuity plans (BCP).

It's been 12 hours since your last bite to eat. Your stomach growls angrily as you meet the host who will take care of all your needs while you prepare to sign a big contract with his company. He takes you out to dinner at a nice restaurant--please tell me you didn't just order a steak!

Several resellers have welcomed Westcon Group’s plans to offer financing to channel partners across hardware, software and services. The distributor’s chief finance and operations officer Asia-Pacific, David Corcoran, said the aim of Westcon Group Capital was to assist resellers to close customer opportunities.

The tasks in Laef Olson’s working hours can be rather varied. Olson, who is the CIO at Software-as-a-Service vendor RightNow Technologies is on the one hand responsible for IT security and the organisation’s information systems, while on the other he spruiks the strategy and vision for the company's on-demand hosting platform. On many occasions Olson gets a direct audience with company CIOs. What makes it easier for Olson to get traction to the upper levels of management is his past. He has been group vice president of global technology operations of Travelport and Orbitz Worldwide. And before that CTO of cars.com. In these roles he was also a consumer of SaaS products. It is that experience that he uses to relate to customers when on the road. Olson briefly stopped over in Australia last month where CIO Magazine asked him about the maturity of SaaS.

Amid the growing popularity of software-as-a-service, IT managers are faced with a sometimes monumental task of developing big-picture strategies and policies to govern service-based applications as well as defining performance metrics and support.

Federal Government ICT spending has begun to flow again after a dry patch in recent months, according to industry sources.

As companies continue to cut costs, consolidate staffs and eviscerate executive salaries, more and more senior-level IT professionals are eyeing corporate exits -- or being shown them against their will.

Back in 1991, before the Internet was a big deal, Ohio State University technologist Jerry Martin signalled the nascent Internet's value with an official standards document entitled "There's gold in them thar networks!" (RFC1290) Although simmering as an academic tool for years, the Internet had not yet triggered a significant paradigm shift for commercial computing. Martin's formal proclamation was an early push to business, which eventually embraced Internet commerce wholeheartedly.

Enterprise IT shops are starting to embrace the notion of building private clouds, modeling their infrastructure after public service providers such as Amazon and Google. But while virtualization and other technologies exist to create computing pools that can allocate processing power, storage and applications on demand, the technology to manage those distributed resources as a whole is still in the early stages.

Little-known technologies that pack a big punch

Australia can be a land of business opposites. On the one suntanned hand, it is vast, economically magnanimous and endowed with a surplus of nature’s bounty that supplies a wealthy, developed market. On the other, it is ridden with natural barriers, geographically remote from the world’s trading centres and burdened with a small population. Its few sizeable businesses have traditionally looked to the distant and cut-throat markets of the US and Europe, instead of its populous neighbours to the immediate north, to achieve growth.

Two years ago this month, Microsoft forged its controversial partnership with Novell that, among other things, had the two companies agreeing not to sue each other over intellectual property issues, in part to protect Suse Linux users over any patent litigation from Microsoft.

Resellers are divided on whether Ingram Micro’s decision to increase freight charges by 9 per cent and add a flat fee to drop shipments was justified. While some have criticised the distributor for the price hike, others are taking it in their stride and flagging bigger concerns around the volatile Australian dollar and product pricing.