Enterprise IT news & views

• 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?

• SAP considers Aussie datacentre

  The Financial Review has reported that German software giant SAP is likely to build an Australian datacentre to provide services to Australian organisations, should new privacy legislation pass that could affect vendors’ ability to sell cloud computing services locally from global facilities.

• How much more do servers cost in Australia?

  How much more do the hardware servers used by small businesses and large organisations cost in Australia? Quite a lot more than in the US, according to a report by small business technology media outlet BIT, in yet another case of the Australian technology tax striking fear into Australian wallets.

• NSW agencies push very hard for SaaS rollouts

  Several major New South Wales Government agencies have unveiled major and wide-ranging plans to imminently purchase Software as a Service-style IT solutions, in moves which have the potential to re-cast the dynamics of the perceived relationship between Australia’s public sector and the burgeoning class of SaaS-delivered IT packages.

• Technology and planned obsolescence

  Very insightful blog post here by Longhaus managing director Peter Carr, who has made a sophisticated argument regarding planned obsolescence with respect to implementing technology in organisations.