In the movies, it’s common for a new prisoner to wait until lunch, then find the biggest, baddest dude in the room and beat him to a pulp. This shows he is not a bitch and is to be feared. Luckily for us, this isn’t prison and I don’t have to demonstrate my physical prowess.

Renai is taking a well deserved break from the site (we don’t want him going postal, do we?) and has asked me to look after Delimiter for the week he’s gone. Some of you may know me already, but for those that don’t, I’m Anthony Agius (aka, decryption), the co-founder of Australia’s largest Apple community, MacTalk and more recently, the founder of One More Thing, an iOS developer conference. I’ve even had a few of my articles re-posted here on Delimiter.

My job for the next week is to keep you guys in order. Basically, act like Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction, when the diner he is in gets held up by Pumpkin and Honey Bunny. Three Little Fonzies, that’s gonna be us. I may even write a few articles if I feel all inspired. Brenton Currie from the iTech Report will be keeping the content ticking over whilst Renai is gone. It should pretty much be business as usual, I’m just keeping Renai’s seat warm.

Every Friday we profile a prominent figure from Australia’s IT, telecommunications or video gaming industries in the Friday Five.

Alan Osrin has had a long career with one company that became another. After helping to found South African business software company Softline in 1988, he worked with the company for the next fifteen years, moving to Australian in 1999, several years before the company was acquired by Sage. At that stage, Osrin took on the managing director role of Sage Australia. But he hasn’t forgotten his roots — and gets back to Africa every couple of years — at least — to visit the game reserves. Osrin’s our guest this week for the Friday Five.

What was your first job ever?
My first job was as an audit clerk for PriceWaterhouse. I did this for two years before leaving to start my own business at the age of 24. During this time I learnt a lot about different businesses and the way they operate. I learnt that unless you are passionate about your business and what you do, you won’t succeed.

What do you most like about working in Australia’s technology industry?
It’s a first world industry, so it’s demanding and competitive. But if you get the recipe of price, service and product reliability right, then the sky is the limit. Customers are very loyal but you always have to make sure you look after your customers, and so you should never take them for granted.

What’s your hobby?
I am a family man so any hobby time is taken up by the family. We are big sports fans, either watching my kids play or one of the professional teams. My boys play basketball and soccer. We are avid footy fans and will be back supporting the West Coast again this year, even though they were last year’s wooden spooners. I also enjoy travelling. Europe is my favourite destination, especially Rome and Paris. However, you haven’t lived until you have visited a game reserve in Africa. I try do that at least once every two years.

What can Australia do better to help grow a great technology sector?
I think that entrepreneurship and start-ups should be encouraged. It is a lot easier for young entrepreneurs to raise funds in the US than it is in Australia. Australia has amazing talent in IT and we should encourage innovation.

What/who has been the biggest inspiration in your career?
My dad was my greatest inspiration. He grew up in an orphanage in Johannesburg and made sure his family would have better opportunities than he had. He was always positive and treated everyone with respect.

I was also very lucky to have started my business (Softline) back in South Africa with two very good friends who also turned out to be great entrepreneurs, Ivan Epstein and Steven Cohen. Softline was sold to Sage Plc in 2003. All three of us are still with Sage.

Image credit: Sage

Every Friday we profile a prominent figure from Australia’s IT, telecommunications or video gaming industries in the Friday Five.

Michael Wyres is that most valuable of beasts; an engineer as good with words as he is with technology. Equally adept at his day job — developing Voice over IP and unified communications solutions — as he is at analysing the telecommunications industry, Wyres is a frequent commenter on his popular blog and on online forums, and can also be found on Twitter. Oh, and he’s also a proud Dad. He’s this week’s guest for the Friday Five.

What was your first job ever?

That actually depends on what you call a “real job”!

I did a couple of brief stints (along with my two sisters) helping out over school holidays at the component manufacturing plant where my father was the production manager. I remember one summer individually checking literally thousands of those army spoon/can opener/bottle opener combination contraptions, making sure that the blades were all attached properly. I still get apoplexy every time I see one of those damn things!

As for the IT industry, while studying computing at the University of Ballarat during the early-to-mid 1990s, a late night thunderstorm basically destroyed what was an already very poor student dial-up bank, and late night telnet sessions became impossible. Someone amongst the “powers that be” decided that it wouldn’t be repaired, and the small group of serious online students at the university were at a loss. Not to be outdone, a lifelong friend (who was studying engineering at the time) and I “offered” to redevelop the university’s very poor website – in what was become the first serious attempt they’d made at a website at that time. Our “payment” was to be given access to the staff dial-up bank so we could update the site as we worked on it.

Naturally, we would never have considered using it for other purposes!

On a professional level, while at the university I obtained Novell Certified Network Engineer accreditation, and took that into a three-year stint as a network support officer in the Melbourne office of preeminent Australian law firm, Mallesons Stephen Jaques. While almost all people in a firm like that are great people and easy to get along with, you certainly get an appreciation for where some lawyers get their reputations for being difficult people! It certainly was an interesting place to hone your customer service skills!

These days I am primarily involved in developing VoIP/FoIP solutions, but seem to bounce around a number of different projects within the company I am with at the moment. It’s nice to be valued.

What do you most like about working in Australia’s technology industry?

I guess it’s a fairly easy statement to make, but there just are so many good people in the industry in this country. I’m lucky to say that I have worked with many people who have taught me a lot, and who I’ve been able to teach things.

The traditional sense of “Aussie ingenuity” is alive and well in technology in Australia, and there are countless great ideas out there, looking for somewhere to grow. I think the industry is in very good hands from a “brains” point of view. I do see a lot of good people heading to the UK and the US in particular to get their big ideas truly up and running in big economies, and it’s a shame that staying at home to do this is so difficult.

What’s your hobby?

Aren’t hobbies something for people with spare time on their hands?

Back in my school days I used to do a lot of camping and hiking, and played high school cricket and football – (Australian Rules of course, you know, real football?) – and was a sprinter in athletics. I was even part of a Victorian state invitational 4 x 100 relay championship win in Year 10 I think it was.

What can Australia do better to help grow a great technology sector?

Access ubiquity.

Australia is almost unique in the world that such a great percentage of our population lives in a narrow strip up and down the eastern seaboard. The backbone of the Australian economy since our nation was born has been farming and mining, yet it is these people and industries who miss out on services when big business or government does the numbers against almost any service or infrastructure program. Small rural towns are dying because people just can’t live in these places in the modern world, and need to move to where the services they need are available. The towns die, and the mining and farming industries can’t get a workforce, and that starts to slowly kill off those industries.

It’s something of a cliche, but ubiquitous access will allow the “digital divide” to be significantly narrowed.

The problem here is while we have the potential to be as good as any other nation in delivering technology services – whether they be for business or consumer consumption – the relatively small size of our economy compared to other countries, makes it difficult for an idea developed here to reach global proportions. If Mark Zuckerberg was an Australian, the chance of him getting Facebook up and running in the Australian economy and have it reach the size it is today would be close to zero. Our infrastructure – although improving – just wouldn’t cope, aside from the economic constraints. So much of our telecommunications infrastructure is heavily outdated.

I would hate to see our kids grow up in a world where other nations streak ahead of us thanks to better communications by having a lack of foresight now. Whether the politicians realise it or not, more and more, life is becoming an online business, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. Although the debate is very colourful and heated at times, it is why programs such as the National Broadband Network are crucial for Australia to be relevant in the world of tomorrow. If we start today, it will be ready ten years from now. If we wait ten years as some would have us do, it will still take another ten years from then to acheive, and I don’t think that in 2030 we can afford to be twenty years behind the countries that have this kind of infrastructure right now.

What/who has been the biggest inspiration in your career?

Both of my parents were very hard working people in their working days. My father spent many years as a Holden dealer in my hometown of Ballarat after taking over the business from his father, and even when he let that go for a new challenge, anything he did always saw him doing extra hours to get things done. My mother was an Intensive Care nurse, and the very nature of what that means suggests a hard work ethic. They both had their challenges in their careers, and watching them handle them I learnt not to take things lying down. If you believe in something, with your actions show the world you believe in it.

Out of left field, as a motor racing buff I’ve long been a fan of Larry Perkins. Although he is not so involved in the sport anymore himself, anyone who knows his history in the sport will understand his passion for attention to detail, and that’s something I aspire to also. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes, but if you want to do something, try and do it right.

In recent years, my partner Naomi and our gorgeous little girl Hannah – (who just started primary school this week) – inspire me every single day to do the best I can to give them everything that I can.

Image credit: Michael Wyres

Cloud computing startups are a dime a dozen right now. But OrionVM, founded by a trio of Sydneysiders in February 2010, looks like it might be closer to launching and winning real customers than some. The company’s cloud platform will go into beta next month, and it has an office in Sydney’s Pitt St. The OrionVM guys are our guests this week for our Monday Startup profile.

Start-up name and website URL: The startup is called OrionVM (or Orion Virtualisation Solutions Pty Limited). Our website can be found at www.orionvm.com.au.

Who are the founders, and what are their backgrounds (for example, previous employment history)?

OrionVM was founded in February 2010 by three founders with a vision to create a high performance cloud infrastructure for Australia. A year later, we have almost completed work on one of Australia’s fastest cloud platforms, which will be going into beta on the 1st of March, 2011.

The founders of OrionVM are Joseph Glanville, Alexander Sharp and Sheng Yeo. Each of us have our key skillset that contribute to making this project run smoothly. Joseph is the resident systems architect of OrionVM. He has the knowledge and experience required to design and build the highly available and redundant architecture required. Joseph has an in-depth understanding of Linux systems, virtualisation and clustering solutions that allows him to design our high performance infrastructure.

Alex is our back-end systems developer who works closely with Joseph to build our custom management, billing and storage infrastructure. Alex has an extensive knowledge of databases and backend development that he has gained from having spent some time at MIT and working for a global content delivery network.

Sheng is deals, taking care of the majority of business-related tasks for the company. He has previously spent several years working for a large accounting and consulting firm. Coming from a background in accounting and networking, he deals with the company’s sales and financial-related matters as well as maintaining our network infrastructure.

What is the story behind how the company was created?

The founders of OrionVM have been friends since meeting at university and working on several other projects in the past. OrionVM was born through a need for a high performance cloud platform in the development of a prior project. Before OrionVM, Alex and Joseph were working on the development of a AI learning search engine that required a large amount of compute power on demand.

While the likes of Google may have the capital to run millions of servers, a small development project like this did not. After spending some time working with the existing platforms available, it was decided that none of them offered the performance or was as easy to use as it should be. After pondering on the idea to build their own platform to run the project on, an idea hit us … “Why don’t we build our own cloud?”. After looking around the marketplace, it was evident that Australia lacked a quality high performance local cloud platform. OrionVM was born soon afterwards.

What problem does the start-up aim to solve, or what product or service does it aim to produce?

OrionVM has almost completed work on a high performance and highly reliable Australian infrastructure as a service (IaaS) platform. We have designed and built this platform from the ground up to be as stable, reliable and redundant as possible.

Unlike many other cloud providers, we have not simply taken off-the-shelf software and installed it on some servers. We have developed a custom hardware and software stack to allow us to deliver a high performance cloud solution without the bottlenecks of a traditional centralised storage architecture. The OrionVM cloud platform offers the benefits of a traditional high performance cloud platform while maintaining an Australian presence.

The problems our service aims to solve are:

• The performance and redundancy issues of a cloud platform backed to traditional storage systems.
• Reducing the latency problems of utilising a non-Australian cloud platform.
• Storing data within Australia to comply with data-locality and data sovereignty issues.

Has the product launched? If not, when does the company plan to launch it?

The OrionVM Cloud Platform will be moving into a public beta on the 1st of March 2011. We are wrapping up the final parts of our code base and will be put through internal testing soon.

What’s the revenue model?

We bill for our services on a per hour basis per amount of each resource used. Memory, storage and bandwidth are billed individually allowing you to specify the exact requirements for your server and only use the resources for as long as you need them.

How is the company funded?

OrionVM has been completely self-funded by its founders.

Where is it based?

We are based out of Sydney in Australia. Our servers are located in the Vocus datacentre in Alexandria and our office is on Pitt Street in the Sydney CBD.

How many staff does it have?

The three founders form the core of the full-time work force. We also currently have two summer interns.

Who are the main competitors?

Our major competitors are as follows:

• Amazon AWS/RackSpace Cloud – US-based clouds, that do not have a local presence.
• Cloud Central – a Canberra based cloud platform
• Rijela Cloud – an arm of Ultraserve, a traditional hosting company.

We have built our cloud platform to offer greater performance and redundancy than our competitors.

What will be the next immediate steps for the company?

The next steps for OrionVM will be to complete the product over the next week or two, and then push it into a public beta trial on the 1st of March 2011. Once we launch our core product, we will be working hard to deliver new and innovate features.

Image credit: OrionVM

Every Friday we profile a prominent figure from Australia’s IT, telecommunications or video gaming industries in the Friday Five.

Ian Raper, the managing director of Riverbed Australia and New Zealand, is a man of few words. But perhaps that’s not important — when like many in Australia’s IT industry, he’s worked his way up to his current lofty position from a humble start — starting his career as a paperboy and then as a steward at the Hampton RSL Club. In life, often it’s actions that count most. He’s this week’s guest on the Friday Five.

What was your first job ever?

Paperboy … first full-time job was a steward at the Hampton RSL Club.

What do you most like about working in Australia’s technology industry?

Opportunity, change and innovation are constants, as Australians tend to be early-adopters of IT and adopt and adapt these very fast.

What’s your hobby?

Motor racing.

What can Australia do better to help grow a great technology sector?

Continue to provide education, invest heavily in research and development which realises technology we can export.

What/who has been the biggest inspiration in your career?

My parents are the biggest inspirations, as they always look to do the right thing, to help others in need and taught me that hard work brings rewards.

Image credit: Riverbed

Every Friday we profile a prominent figure from Australia’s IT, telecommunications or video gaming industries in the Friday Five.

Richard Bradley is the chief executive of ASX-listed enterprise, workforce and sales Management vendor ComOps. And you could definitely say he’s been around for the long haul. He founded the company in 1972, and has been involved in all aspects of the company’s development since that point. But if you saw Bradly on his tractor on the family winery in the Hunter Valley you might doubt for a second that he was a high-flying business executive :) Bradley is our guest this week for the Friday Five.

What was your first job ever?

My first job after leaving Sydney Grammar School was as a trainee chartered accountant with Wilson Danby and Giddy – Chartered Accountants in Melbourne. Wilson Danby and Giddy have since been swallowed up by one of the Big Five. This laid the foundation for my finance business knowledge and the backbone for the design of our first business software products.

What do you most like about working in Australia’s technology industry?

As with many ventures in Australia we are at the leading edge and like other companies are not afraid to experiment with the latest available technologies as they evolve. Our own business customers over the years have always supported our innovative approach and have remained loyal through thick and thin.

What’s your hobby?

Golf (9 handicap), snow skiing and running our family winery in the Hunter Valley (Calais Estate), which usually results in many hours on the tractor allowing plenty of quality time to resolve the business challenges that inevitably come home with you on the weekend.

What can Australia do better to help grow a great technology sector?

With the advent of the new broadband network throughout Australia we’ll be better equipped to conduct innovative research and development that Australian IT companies have become famous for. The greatest step forward however would be a Government investment scheme to assist entrepreneurs to finance their development dreams rather than to seek assistance offshore. Government preference, investment and support could make a huge difference to our industry.

What/who has been the biggest inspiration in your career?

My father, who was an extremely successful business man and was definitely my mentor. He guided and advised me on the majority of my career moves including finance, sales and management up to the point of founding ComOps. A very conservative man who always thought carefully before offering advice.

Image credit: ComOps

Local social bookmarking startup Trunk.ly suffered a trial by fire when it soft-launched in December 2010, as rumours swirled that Yahoo would shut down its dominant Delicious site. In this profile, the company’s founders Tim Bull and Alex Dong talk about the current state of their startup, and the likely future.

Who are the founders, and what are their backgrounds (for example, previous employment history)?

Tim Bull (pictured, right), director at PwC working in its Global IT Architecture team. Alex Dong (pictured, below left), co-founder Hoakanbu.com, the largest photo-blogging site in China. Exited that in 2008 and then “world traveler” in 2009. We jointly co-founded BinaryPlex Pty Ltd (our ‘corporate’ identity) in November 2009 and since then have launched several products including Tribalytic, a Twitter market research tool.

What is the story behind how the company was created (for example, when did the founders meet, where did the idea come from, what was its early history)?

We met at BootUp Camp, a two-week event organized by Bart Jellema, Kim Chen and Brian Menzies designed to help founders get a feel for running and launching their first startup. After working on the same project (JudgeItNow, since defunct), sharing a backpackers room together and basically living in each other’s pockets for 2 weeks straight, it was clear to us both that not only could we work together, but we really enjoyed it.

Trunk.ly isn’t our first idea, in fact we’ve pivoted several times, but the common thread to everything we’ve done is how to get utility from people’s online digital trails. As far as the genesis of the idea, we had a lot of frustration as active social media users that we could never find links again after we’d shared them. We spoke to a few people and realised that this was a common frustration.

What problem does the start-up aim to solve, or what product or service does it aim to produce?

Trunk.ly connects into your online networks like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Posterous, Delicious and more and monitors them for any links that you share. Whenever you indicate that a link has value (for example by sharing it on Twitter), Trunk.ly collects them, crawls the web page the link points to and stores them for you, building a personal search engine of not only the content stored with the link, but of the page the link points to as well.

Quite simply, Trunk.ly’s goal is to ensure you never forget a link.

Has the product launched? If not, when does the company plan to launch it?

It was launched prematurely on the 16th of December when the rumours leaked that Yahoo might be shutting down Delicious. We had this vague mental runway that we’d launch Trunk.ly towards mid-January 2011 once we’d tested it with more users and finished a few features, but the opportunity was just too good. As a start-up it’s really hard to get cut-through and have people be interested in what you’re doing, and here we had a really active community that was actively looking for an alternative solution.

Although the first four weeks were really hard, we think it was ultimately worth the pain – we managed to achieve coverage and gain attention that I think it would have been very hard to do without that immediate interest in bookmarking and link curation.

What’s the revenue model?

We haven’t implemented one as yet — there are a few ideas gestating however, it’s not really our immediate concern. Since launch, we’ve seen a lot of signs that this is a much-needed solution. Social bookmarking has actually been remarkably unsocial for a long time, and there is a real appetite for what we’re doing.

We’re bumping around Alexa’s Top 20K global websites, we’ve got a strong and growing community who have taken our API and are actually building solutions with it, and in the last week, we indexed some 2.2 million links for our users. That’s just in our first month.

Before we rush into slapping on a half-baked charging idea that annoys everyone, we want to explore things a lot more – we know people use us, but we’re still understanding how and what it is they want to do with the tool. Once we get this (and we are building all sorts of metrics to help us understand this) we can really start to optimize around a those behaviours and make sure we have a really compelling experience.

How is the company funded?

Self-funded to date – a combination of saved cash and some revenue from Tribalytic and a bit of contract work towards the end of last year.

Where is it based?

Melbourne, Australia

How many staff does it have?

Two of us at the moment, but we have lots of great supporters in both the Australian startup community and the Trunk.ly user community too. For example, one user really wanted an RSS connector for Trunk.ly, the approached us and offered to help, so we gave them a spec and they wrote it for us then open sourced it so we could quickly implement it.

Who are the main competitors?

Right now it’s other bookmarking sites like Diigo.com, Pinboard.in and Faves.com. We have a very open nature to what we are doing – ultimately users own their data and they can do what they want with it, they can export it or they can access it via the REST API.

What will be the next immediate steps for the company?

From a product perspective, we want to keep improving the user experience of Trunk.ly — at the moment it’s a really useful tool, but we can do a lot more to make it something you come back to every day. We also want to work on the social experience — we think it’s important, but it’s not yet where we want it to be at. The other thing is funding — we think Trunk.ly has significant potential and we’re actively looking for Angel investors that can help us get there.

Image credits: Trunk.ly

Every Friday we profile a prominent figure from Australia’s IT, telecommunications or video gaming industries in the Friday Five.

Sqware Peg‘s Australian country manager Adrian Jones might focus on cloud computing these days, but he didn’t always. A few decades ago he was all about green screens. Let’s hope you never have to deal with one of those terminal babies every again, Adrian! In the meantime, Jones is this week’s guest on the Friday Five.

What was your first job ever?

My first job was as a procurement officer for ICL in the late 1980’s. We did have one of the largest “lights out” warehouses in Europe, but yes – it was all operated through classic green screens. The funny thing was they had a museum on site that had the first electric typewriters and punch card computers – we were WAY ahead!

What do you most like about working in Australia’s technology industry?

I believe Australians are early adopters, and this combined with a market size that lends itself to trialling new technologies, applications and platforms is very rewarding when a project or idea is “taken global’.

What’s your hobby?

Right now? Learning how to coach kids cricket. It’s not as easy as it looks (especially at 8.30am on a Saturday morning), but it is very rewarding! As a family we enjoy all sorts of sports, especially anything that involves the ocean! I have recently renovated an old wooden Mirror dinghy and love taking the family out for a spin. We have two boys, aged seven and four and they are quickly getting the hang of it all.

What is just as fascinating is watching their adoption of technology and the innate way that they use products and applications they come across. Where is the camera on our home phone, Dad? How come I cannot drag and drop Foxtel? Granny and Grandpa are not much good at drawing on webcam are they?

What can Australia do better to help grow a great technology sector?

First, I would say continue to focus on improving broadband access to enable the cloud and applications of that technology to accelerate its already massive adoption curve. Secondly, provide schools with the facilities required to teach our kids how to utilise and learn new ways to use this technology. Finally, support our small Australian businesses in the IT sector!

What/who has been the biggest inspiration in your career?

My parents were both dentists and instilled customer service, hard work and a sense of professionalism – standards that I continue to hold myself to.

Over the years, I have been fortunate to work with many great managers and business leaders, from sales managers that helped me to improve my sales effectiveness, to general managers and CEOs that have literally transformed businesses I have been part of. These include Peter Bonfield and David Palk at ICL Fujitsu in the UK, Peter Maloney and Christine Christian at Dun & Bradstreet here in Australia and the CEO of Sqware Peg, Shawn Stilwell.

Image credit: Sqware Peg

It’s safe to say David Caspari (pictured) had a bit of a rough ride when he took the local reins of EDS in October 2008 scant monts after his employer of just one year — HP — bought the Texan IT services giant.

Caspari was already a seasoned technology executive at the time. Before being appointed to lead the new HP Enterprise Services division formed out of the rubble of the merger, he had already been leading HP’s Technology Solutions Group in the Asia-Pacific and Japan region — overseeing some 14 countries. And in the past he’d held similar lofty roles — leading Cisco’s Asia-Pacific sales and operations for its core telco market, and also working in senior positions for Nortel, Bay Networks and Alcatel.

But it’s hard to be able to know whether anybody could have been prepared for what Caspari would have had to deal with at EDS at the time.

The newly merged pair of companies had already revealed plans to lay off some 75 staff in Australia, and later in November confirmed plans to cut about another 7.5 percent of their local workforce — at that time around 6,000 staff.

EDS’ workforce exploded with dissent.

The company’s key union — the Association of Professional Engineers, Scientists and Managers Australia — became involved and line managers started leaking inside details to the press as they despaired of being forced to lay off teams they’d painstakingly built up over years. The events culminated in what will be forever remembered by Australia’s IT industry as a black day — when a sacked EDS worked attempted suicide at the company’s Burwood facility.

For most of the two years since, Caspari has taken the approach to appearing in public that his boss, HP Australia chief Paul Brandling, has long favoured: Don’t do it. But in a rare appearance in front of the press yesterday to announce HP’s local private cloud computing strategy, the executive appeared to have come out of the past two years of company integration unscathed.

“We’ve had our head down, working hard,” Caspari laughed after being asked to talk about the integration experience.

The executive said the company felt as if it had made “incredible progress” and been very successful in the period. The company’s goal, he said, had always been to make sure that it continued to deliver world-class services to clients, while making sure that it took its “very important and critical employee base” through the integration journey.

At a personal level, Caspari said, he had experienced “great personal satisfaction” that the company was now “well-positioned for success in the future”. HP Enterprises Services was, Caspari said, now very focused on winning in the marketplace and “delighting” its clients.

In that area, too, however, HP faces challenges in Australia.

EDS had built its stunning success and huge employee base in Australia on a series of mega-contracts; billion-dollar comprehensive technology outsourcing deals with the likes of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, the South Australian Government and the Australian Taxation Office.

But in the new era of multi-sourcing, organisations — including all of the three named above — are carving off chunks of their large contracts into smaller pieces, each of which can be picked up by a different service provider specialised in a certain area — such as telecommunications, for example, or desktop support.

EDS’ deal with the ATO, for example — was sliced in three chunks. And two of those chunks were won by HP’s rivals , with Lockheed Martin picking up the desktop support aspect and Optus winning control of the ATO’s network.

Also, over the past several years, HP Enterprise Services has been slow to name new Australian customers publicly; unlike rivals such as IBM (which has won deals with the National Australia Bank and Westpac in recent months, for example) and CSC, which has been successful in resources and financial services.

Yet yesterday Caspari claimed the past financial year had been kind to his division.

“It’s been a very good year for us,” he said, noting the company had grown faster than the local market and had “taken market share from our competitors”. It had also been “a year of innovation” as the company prepared to launch its cloud computing model, ‘Utility Services’, in Australia.

Caspari gave two examples of recent customer wins to back his argument. Firstly, he pointed out that HP had retained some of the EDS business with the Australian Taxation Office — the central computing contract which covers mainframe, mid-range, data warehousing, storage and secure gateway services to the massive government agency.

The HP executive described the ATO’s decision as “a big vote of confidence” in his company.

Secondly, the executive flagged HP’s involvement in the Leighton-led consortium announced this week (PDF) to build the new Royal Adelaide Hospital as a public/private partnership. It remains unclear exactly what the technology vendor’s role is in the project, but the hospital will be a large one — with 800 beds and advanced technology features such as beside entertainment, in-house wireless internet, equipment tracking capability and so on.

Caspari said the wins were “just two of many examples” that underpinned the market share growth that the company had had in the past year.

Then too, HP Enterprise Services is planning for the future in Australia. The executive also confirmed the company was ploughing some $119 million into a massive new datacentre in Sydney’s Eastern Creek facility. The project — which is expected to take about 12 months to be completed — will play strongly into the company’s strategy of providing cloud computing services hosted in Australia.

Perhaps the last thing that you could say about Caspari might be a speculative guess about his future.

The current leader of HP’s overall business in Australia is Paul Brandling, the company’s reclusive vice president and managing director of its South Pacific region. Brandling — who rarely appears in public and regularly declines interviews, despite the multi-billion dollar size of his company’s revenues in Australia — has been in his role since 2002; having led HP acquisition Compaq locally before that.

HP Australia has never articulated a clear succession plan, but Caspari’s would likely be one name that would come up in the event of Brandling’s departure from the business or migration to a different role. The executive has already held a plethora of regional and country management roles, after all, and he’s the most high-profile executive below Brandling in Australia.

Perhaps most importantly, he’s successfully kept the lid firmly closed on the EDS pressure cooker in the Australian market over the past two years, avoiding any more embarassing leaks and keeping the unions out of the picture — at least publicly.

This week, Caspari gave no indication that he wasn’t excited by HP’s current prospects.

Interrupting his fellow executives several times during yesterday’s press conference as his passion for the subject burst out of him, he leaned across the table to speak excitedly about the company’s global strengths. Caspari said HP was “the largest IT company in the world”, with some 300,000 staff globally, and that this scale meant HP’s global product development capabilities were unmatched — and that this factor would flow through to the company’s local private cloud deployments.

“It’s something that should not be underestimated,” he said. Words that could perhaps apply to Caspari himself.

Image credit: wlodi, Creative Commons and HP

Queensland Technology and Public Works Minister Robert Schwarten is not an easy target for a Liberal-National Party MP to take on. A veteran of the state Labor Party’s decade-long grip on power in the state and one of its most senior members by any measure, Schwarten is a big fish and has long had a firm grip on his portfolio.

Among state technology ministers, which tend to come and go like flies, Schwarten is also a rarity; a politician who’s held the low-profile portfolio for several terms and has long-standing contacts in the local technology sector.

However, the long-lived Schwarten might just be about to face one of his toughest opponents yet.

Several weeks ago the state’s Liberal-National Party went through a reshuffle of its top ranks that resulted in Shadow ICT Minister Jann Stuckey being ousted from the portfolio, and a young gun, member for Indooroopilly Scott Emerson, parachuted into her role. There are several notable things about Emerson that might give Schwarten pause with respect to his new parliamentary opponent.

Firstly, you could aptly describe the younger Emerson (he’s 46, compared to Schwarten’s 56) as a master of the media.

For most of his career (aptly described on Wikipedia, we assume by his own staff), Emerson was a journalist, initially for the ABC as part of its radio division, but then in the mid-1990s as a political reporter in Queensland for The Australian newspaper; a post which eventually led to the lofty role of chief of staff for the newspaper during the Sydney Olympics. After 2004 Emerson left the paper, winning a Churchill Fellowship to study political campaigning; he ultimately ended up helping to run a Brisband-based public relations firm after that, before being elected to the Queensland Parliament in March 2009.

And in the scant weeks since he was appointed — as he said in a brief interview this week, “five minutes” ago — Emerson has put that experience to good use.

The Queensland Labor Government — and Schwarten’s own career — has not been short of technology-related issues over the years; the recent Queensland Health payroll debacle being the most recent example.

During the 2009 state election, the local ICT industry took the unusual step of blockading an election debate with yellow t-shirts in order to get its point across that both sides of politics needed to pay attention to the sector.

Emerson has already taken advantage of Labor’s problems to start levelling accusations of poor management at Schwarten — blasting him in one media release as “refusing to take responsibility for a monumental blunder that occurred on his watch” and claiming other issues at Education Queensland were “a major saga” along the same lines.

The politician also has responsibility for the science portfolio, and Emerson has also started antagonising the Government in that sector; labelling Labor’s approach as “spin and slogans”.

In an interview this week, Emerson said his appointment as Shadow ICT and Science Minister was a “commitment” from the Liberal-National Party to the portfolio in terms of where it was going as a party.

The politician says as his first steps opposing Schwarten, he will be talking to people across the industry in the private and public sectors — to gauge an impression of where things were going well; and where not so well. One issue — a favourite one of Queensland-based technology companies like Technology One — will be the extent to which the State Government uses local products.

“In terms of ICT particularly, [the Queensland Government] is probably the biggest consumer of ICT products in the state; but not the biggest consumer of Queensland’s ICT products,” says Emerson. “The LNP is a party which is determined to support the local ICT industry; and business and job creation.”

Other issues will include getting the basics right, an area in which Labor has suffered some problems in the past. “The bottom line for ICT for a state government is reliability,” says Emerson. “ICT does provide opportunities to provide services to Queenslanders more efficiently and effectively — but it also has to be more reliable.”

Another issue in Queensland is the National Broadband Network. Like most Labor state government’s Anna Bligh’s administration is behind the initiative; but it’s also facing dissent from rural councils and the Liberal-National party dominated Brisbane Council, which has pledged to roll out its own fibre around the city in competition with the NBN.

Emerson says obviously the issue will affect all state governments, and while he’s reluctant to comment on the issue in depth, he says like the Federal Coalition, what concerns him about the project is the cost.

“From what I’ve seen, Labor is backing Labor on this one,” he says, when asked what the situation is in Queensland in terms of the opt-in/opt-out dichotomy causing debate around the nation in terms of the NBN. “But I think there are serious questions that need to be asked about the NBN,” he adds — noting his opinion that the Bligh Government is “not interested” in asking them.

Ultimately, whether Emerson can give Schwarten and the Bligh Government in general a run for their money on technology issues will depend on several factors; access to information from the industry, how well he understands the technology sector, and of course taking advantage of the sorts of opportunities that blunders like the Queensland Health payroll debacle offer.

When asked if he has a background in the sector, the politician doesn’t reply directly. But he notes his career has always been about information in general. “By profession I was a journalist,” he says. “I have been very involved in information for all of my life.”

Access to sources paid off for Emerson already this week; allowing him to gain information about Education Queensland’s OneSchool project that fuelled an ability to attack the Government on the issue. No doubt the sector will be watching closely to see how much further its newest advocate can go.

Image credit: Office of Scott Emerson