Enterprise IT news & views

• Govt pushes ahead with cloud-sharing approach

  The Federal Government today revealed a standardised approach to sharing computing workloads between agencies, in a so-called ‘community cloud’ strategy that will attempt to leverage existing infrastructure operated by major departments such as the Department of Human Services to provide services to smaller agencies.

• The ABC didn’t sack Bitcoin miner

  The Australian Broadcasting Corporation didn’t fire an un-named IT worker who attempted to use the broadcaster’s vast server infrastructure to make himself a fortune through the Bitcoin virtual currency system, it has emerged, with the employee merely being disciplined and having their access to certain IT systems restricted.

• Victoria dumps HealthSMART e-health project

  The Victorian State Government has reportedly decided to walk away from its troubled central electronic health project HealthSMART, which has reached only a limited number of its goals over the past decade since it was initiated, despite soaking up several hundred million dollars worth of government funding.

• HP completes giant new NSW datacentre

  Global technology giant HP has finished building its colossal $119 million new datacentre in Western Sydney and will launch the “world-class” facility next month, with a speech slated to be given by Communications Minister Stephen Conroy.

• Microsoft beats Salesforce to utility CRM deal

  Energy retailer Australian Power & Gas has picked Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM system over rivals Salesforce.com and Right CRM as the base platform for a customer relationship management overhaul to tackle incoming email complaints.

• NSW finalises colossal datacentre consolidation

  The New South Wales State Government this week announced the Leighton subsidiary Metronode as the winner of its long-running and wide-ranging datacentre overhaul project, with the company to construct two new substantial facilities which will allow the state to consolidate its IT operations drastically.

• Two good Australian CIO interviews

  There have been a couple of good interviews with Australian chief information officers done by various media outlets over the past couple of days — good enough that we thought them worth highlighting to readers on Delimiter.

• Three lessons ING’s private cloud teaches us

  If you could provision a new copy of your organisation’s entire internal application environment for development purposes in just ten minutes, and you could do whatever you liked with it, what sort of new systems and processes would you build?