Delimiter » cio

Microsoft beats Salesforce to utility CRM deal

Renai LeMay — Thu, 17 May 2012 05:20:32 +0000

news 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.

In a statement released today by Microsoft, Redmond said the utility had recently had “a surge in its customer base” to close to 350,000 customers, which created the need for a platform to maintain and track customer records.

“Australian Power & Gas received over 10,000 customer emails over the last 12 months – relating to topics including enquiries, complaints and the retention of customers,” the statement said. “With no process in place, Australian Power & Gas was manually passing these enquires to the relevant people within the business, leading to administrative problems. As a result, the business worked with Microsoft partner, CSG, to implement Microsoft Dynamics CRM to handle all of its electronic correspondence, improve its processes and ensure better customer service.”

Australian Power & Gas also evaluated competing CRM vendors Salesforce.com and Right CRM, but ended up going with the Microsoft package due to the “return on investment and ease of use”, according to Microsoft. Australian Power & Gas, CIO, Joseph Gullotta, said: “The Microsoft Dynamics CRM system is a platform that is very stable, customisable, and empowering, allowing us to take all the complexity out of what can be a very complex environment.”

“Profiling and understanding our customers is important to Australian Power & Gas which is why the CRM component has been so useful. Microsoft Dynamics offered us the versatility needed to program and change the environment to handle emails as a workflow activity. Allowing us to track, escalate and respond to each individual enquiry in a timely manner has given Australian Power & Gas an edge over our competitors,” said Mr. Gullotta.

“Moving forward, Australian Power & Gas’s data warehouse built on Microsoft SQL Server R2 is a key focus, particularly the data the business is incorporating into the warehouse,” Microsoft’s statement said. “The business is now starting to reap the rewards of the warehouse which is why it’s looking at expanding this area in support of its business intelligence, reporting and analytical capability.” Added CIO Gullotta: “We’re putting more work into our data warehouse so the ability to gather and use more information has been great.”

The news comes as it remains unclear how strong Salesforce.com’s current levels of success are in the Australian market. Several of its major rivals, including Oracle and Microsoft, have recently announced major Australian customer wins for their CRM platforms, but Salesforce.com has not.

Oracle announced in January that various top Australian public and private sector entities had implemented its CRM On Demand software as a service suite to upgrade customer service, gain access to real-time analytics, and enable speeding up of adaptive business planning. According to a statement issued yesterday by Oracle, local customers who have been provisioned in its local datacentre on the Oracle CRM On Demand platform include the Victorian Department of Human Services, NSW government agency NSW Businesslink, NBN Co, AJ Lucas and Suncorp. In September 2011, Oracle had announced a rollout of the CRM On Demand platform for Telstra Wholesale.

Some of Microsoft’s recent Australian customer wins for its Dynamics CRM platform include Curtin University Coffs Harbour City Council, Tim Davies Landscaping, Capital Transport and Relationships Australia.

Even smaller Australian competitor Technology One has been signing up major new customers for its CRM package. Among the customers signing up for the latest release of the TechnologyOne software are Mission Australia; the New Zealand Ministry for the Environment; TePou, through Wise Management Services; Tasrail; the Tasmanian Department of Health and Human Services; and other Australian government organisations.

However, Salesforce.com has not recently disclosed any significant Australian wins for its various platforms, including its CRM option. In mid-June, the company is expected to discuss its local fortunes and disclose new customers as part of its annual Cloudforce conference, which will be held in Sydney on 14 June.

opinion/analysis
The most interesting thing about Australia’s enterprise CRM market at the moment is how the traditional vendors – Oracle, Microsoft and others – appear to be making hay while Salesforce.com’s sun appears to be dimming.

If I was an IT manager in a commercial enterprise, I would be loathe to put a new Microsoft or Oracle CRM platform in at the moment. While both are good options technically, Salesforce.com has historically been the leader technologically in the software as a service cloud deployment model, and there aren’t a huge number of reasons not to deploy CRM platforms into the cloud at the moment, in my opinion.

But we’re just not hearing much from Salesforce.com in the Australian market at the moment. The company has been quiet for about 12 months now, at a time, when its rivals – even including the smaller Netsuite – have been very active in the market. I would have expected to have heard about some huge Salesforce.com deployments locally by now, as well as some innovative uses of its smaller software chunks – Chatter, Radian6, Force.com and Heroku. But the buzz around the company has died down to almost nil recently.

Is Salesforce.com actually doing really well in Australia, but just not talking about it, while the other vendors are? Perhaps, but not likely. The company has historically been quite open and transparent.

My gut tells me that Salesforce.com is struggling to convince Australian enterprises of the value of its solutions, in the face of offerings from the likes of Microsoft and Oracle, which not only have on-shore deployment models as well as off-shore SaaS platforms, but also have wider ecosystems. As Australian Power & Gas’s CIO said bluntly in this interview this week with iTNews, the company tries to go Microsoft whenever possible. And for customers who already had Oracle ERP, financials, HR, databases and so on, the same would often be true for the company’s CRM platform.

Of course, much of this is speculation. We’ll likely find out more about how Salesforce.com is doing in Australia over the next month as it Cloudforces it up in Sydney. Personally I hope the vendor is just playing its cards close to its chest and has some mega deployments it’s planning to spill shortly. But only time will tell.

Image credit: Microsoft

Two good Australian CIO interviews

Renai LeMay — Wed, 16 May 2012 03:45:14 +0000

blog 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.

At iTNews (click here for the full article), Ry Crozier (who we consider one of the best and most straight-up enterprise IT journalists in Australia) goes through the Queensland Department of Transport and Main Roads three-year integration of two previous departments. A representative paragraph:

The department’s Information Division – internally known as iDivision – is a “hybrid” of the two former departmental ICT teams, according to [ chief information officer Chris Fechner]. “We didn’t try and subvert one or the other,” he says.

Over at ZDNet.com.au (click here for the full article), there’s a solid yarn by Luke Hopewell, focusing on Allianz chief information officer Steve Coles, who was at a CSC event this week talking about re-using technology. A sample paragraph:

“I hate the term ‘legacy’ technology,” [Coles said.] “Legacy means [a system has] got to be replaced, and we’ve got to get a shiny new one. For us, it’s been a key part of our strategy to reuse and simplify rather than rip and replace.”

What did we like about both interviews? They both went deep, and they both went into what we call “high” enterprise IT. In other words, not just surface-level questions such as desktop operating system upgrades or “how do you use iPads in the enterprise”, but into questions of enterprise IT architecture and technology strategy. Some very interesting themes came out of both. Kudos!

AGIMO needs a little Obama magic

Renai LeMay — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 06:52:20 +0000

opinion The Australian Government’s peak IT strategy agency is currently drowning in a sea of technocratic waffle that would do Sir Humphrey Appleby proud. It needs to take a step back and appoint a leader from the private sector to help it focus its efforts on a limited number of high-profile projects which would actually enhance government IT service delivery.

Last week, the Federal Government did something that, after the best part of a decade dealing with it as a journalist, I have become accustomed to never expecting: It gave in and released a large amount of sensitive information voluntarily.

The information consisted of a series of reports and documents which had been commissioned into the performance of the Government’s centralised IT strategy agency, the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO), as well as a separate document put together by that agency to steer technology strategy across government in the coming years.

Now, I had been expecting the worst kind of dogfight to wrest these documents out of the Government’s hands. We only know of their existence because of a successful Freedom of Information request I filed a while back. It exposed the fact that Special Minister of State Gary Gray was pretty concerned about the ability of AGIMO to deliver on its mission of setting central government IT strategy, as well as the existence of a number of reviews examining that issue.

But last Friday afternoon, only days after I filed a second FoI request for the reports themselves, I received an unexpected call from the Department of Finance and Deregulation, which houses AGIMO. The agency, I was told, had decided to release the reports voluntarily through its website that very day. So there was no need for me to persist with my FoI request in the area. At first I was puzzled by this response. Release information voluntarily? The very concept is normally anathema to the Government. But then as I read through the several hundreds of pages of documents which had been released last week, it all started to make sense.

Three reports were released last week. One, put together by AGIMO, constitutes what it describes as a Strategic Vision for the Australian Government’s use of Information and Communications Technology. One, put together by high-profile consultant Ian Reinecke, is a report into that vision. And one, by former broadband department secretary Helen Williams, is a report into AGIMO’s ability to deliver on its vision.

And, despite the three reports in total constituting some 153 pages of expert government opinion, none of them says much of anything at all, in a great amount of detail. If you don’t believe me, I challenge you to read the reports yourself. After a certain number of pages, your brain begins to turn to mush.

AGIMO’s ICT vision predominantly contains a number of high-level statements about the importance of technology to the Federal Government. A representative paragraph:

“Technological developments have increased personal, business and national productivity. ICT has also become fundamental to how government operates. The Government’s use of ICT affects all Australians. People and businesses benefit from simpler, easier-to-use and quicker interactions with Government. The use of ICT-related opportunities is integral to developing government policies and services. ICT offers new ways to design, develop and deliver services, automate existing services, and more effectively consult and engage with a broader range of stakeholders.”

Yes, you might ask yourself; it all sounds very well and good, but what does it actually mean? Or take this paragraph, from Williams’ report into AGIMO’s ability to deliver on its vision:

“Some months ago, [the Secretaries ICT Governance Board] approved a schema summarising a proposed model for cases where a lead agency is required to progress a feasibility study with support from stakeholder agencies. The model gives the lead agency responsibility for project and resource management, for initiating and chairing a cross-agency reference group, for promulgating information to stakeholder agencies and for reporting to the relevant governance committees. AGIMO has been given responsibility for preparing the governance committee papers, ensuring that appropriate terms of reference are prepared for each reference group and providing support for the reference groups.”

Again, you might ask yourself, what does this actually mean? I’ve been writing about technology in government for the better part of a decade now, and to be honest, I really have no idea. Reinecke’s report is a little better. The consultant is quite plain-spoken as an individual, and he often tends to say what he means. But that doesn’t mean his report is lacking a certain style of bureaucratic waffle of its own. Witness the following statement:

“In its current version the implementation plan for the vision has a somewhat ‘technology first’ approach rather than an emphasis on defining business requirements and processes that deliver them effectively … There is an inherent tension between the tactical functions of designing and providing operational support and the strategic approach necessary for policy formation that obliges agencies to undertake specific actions. To conflate the level of authority and type of expertise required for the former with the level of authority required for the latter blurs the governance model and weakens accountability.”

Now, I think it is relatively clear, from the perspective of someone in my position as a reporter and commentator on government technology matters, what sorts of problems AGIMO faces.

The agency’s fundamental role is that of an organisation setting technology policies and strategies across the entire Federal Government sector — from Tax to Human Services, from Defence to Customs, and all the tiny agencies in between. However, it sits in the middle between a number of powerful organisations, and has very little real power to enforce outcomes on those organisations, or any control on how they spend their money.

Thus, you get individual agencies signing individual contracts with major suppliers, ignoring the potential to save money through cross-government scale, and individual agencies rolling out individual IT projects, without regard to how standardisation could aid collaboration across government.

In an environment with limited IT staffing resources to start with (predominantly, Canberra) and at a time of intense technological change when governments right around Australia and the globe are struggling with problems of governance of IT projects, AGIMO has often been left in an untenable position in the Government; sometimes, I would anticipate, screaming into a void.

If you try hard to get beyond the waffle and read between the lines of the reports released last week, you can see these problems coming up again and again. The issues with governance, especially associated with the Secretaries ICT Governance Board and its arcane processes. The necessity, when working cross-government, of constantly trying to translate high-level motherhood statements into tactical approaches to generating real-world outcomes. And especially, a constant public sector mandate that all t’s must be crossed and I’s dotted, lest the heavy gaze of each department’s political masters come down on them, following a failed initiative.

In government, every decision must be able to be justified to the Nth degree, and every ass must be covered in the event of problems.

But what strikes me about the information released over the past week or so by AGIMO and the Finance Department in general, is that as this bureaucratic miasma of biblical proportions proceeds unchecked, an opportunity is being lost for some clear-sighted wins in the Federal Government. There is so much waffle in and around AGIMO right now that any actual leadership being shown by the agency is being obscured.

If you read between the lines of Special Minister of State Gary Gray’s internal memo about AGIMO, what strikes me is that it appears that the Minister, also is struggling with the same issues that I am about the agency; namely: What does it do? Is it doing a good job at that? And what should its focus be in future?

Public servants have long known that in Government, the way to generate substantive change is to get a small number of popular big ticket projects approved, and then tack smaller initiatives onto them under their large overarching umbrella. Good examples in the current Federal Government would be the way that Stephen Conroy’s National Broadband Network project is attempting to meet a number of complex policy objectives through attacking the populist issue of universal access to fast broadband, or the way that the Australian Taxation Office bundled a number of wide-ranging IT projects under the larger “Change Program” umbrella.

But if I look at AGIMO right now, I feel as though there is a vast gulf between the way that politicians such as Gray view the agency, and what they would like it to achieve, and the way that AGIMO and other departmental bodies view it.

Ideally, Gray and Labor in general would like AGIMO to be involved in the kind of big ticket projects which would illustrate to the public that Labor was achieving dramatic and positive internal change in the way the Government uses technology. In contrast, I feel that AGIMO feels much of its work is in tying together little things into bigger outcomes; setting standards across government, for example, or helping departments review IT projects. You know, the kind of things that slowly increase the quality of IT governance within the public sector, but which don’t necessarily create a big public splash.

You can see that AGIMO is trying to target these big ticket items. The agency’s work on centralised IT procurement, with whole of government contracts with vendors like Microsoft, is a good example of this. And AGIMO has also given a strong boost towards public sector accountability, through so-called Web 2.0, social media and document licensing initiatives. It’s been trying, but broadly failing, I would argue, to make some headway on cloud computing strategies.

But my overwhelming feeling, which returns every time I read another report about the agency, is that it’s not focusing enough on those big ticket items which would give it a more visible presence within Government; a presence that would demonstrate that what it’s doing matters, and that it’s having a real impact on the way the public sector uses technology. In short: AGIMO can’t focus. It’s an agency which needs to help oversee the public sector and push it in a certain direction. But it’s become too much a part of that same public sector for it to be effective at that task. It’s enmeshed in bureaucratic waffle, with no immediate hope of breaking free.

In my opinion, what its political masters need to do with AGIMO is to stop reviewing its operations and asking it to present reports. The agency needs new, dynamic, vigorous leadership; ideally from the private sector, from an industry like financial services and banking which has similar cross-jurisdictional issues, and it needs a beefed up mandate so that government departments and agencies would find it very hard to say “no” when it comes calling asking for change. It needs decisive action and vision, of which it currently has little. It shouldn’t take a year for AGIMO to get an ICT strategy approved. What it should take is a direct call from the leader of the agency to the Prime Minister.

This kind of change is not unprecedented, in at least one jurisdiction which Australia loves to compare itself to.

In the US, then-new US President Barack Obama unleashed a wave of change in the country’s Federal public sector with the 2009 appointment of Vivek Kundra as its first whole of government chief information officer. For all his faults (and I have severely criticised him previously for leaving his role too early for a job at cloud computing vendor Salesforce.com), Kundra was successful in the role by harshly focusing on just a handful of projects.

Kundra’s Data.gov, IT dashboard, TechStat and whole of government cloud computing initiatives profoundly changed the way the US Government as a whole manages technology projects, in just a short two-year period in which he held his office. Kundra was also successful in getting top-level executive buy-in from Obama himself.

It’s hard to imagine AGIMO getting to the point where it has the direct support and interest of Australia’s Prime Minister of the day in its efforts. And its certainly hard to imagine Australia’s current whole of government CIO Ann Steward wielding the same influence in our federal public sector as Kundra did in his. But there is no doubt that this is the sort of ambition which the agency should be holding. I know that a number of senior CIOs in Australia’s Federal Government — not to mention in the private sector as well — have closely followed Kundra’s efforts and are aware of the change going on in the US Government right now. Why aren’t we seeing these kinds of ideas incorporated into AGIMO’s approach in Australia?

You might have wondered what the picture was at the top of this article. That photo is of US President Obama testing out Kundra’s IT dashboard outside the Oval Office in the White House. That’s the sort of executive buy-in which AGIMO should be aiming for in Australia. It’s real, it exists and the agency is capable of it, if it puts its thinking cap on and its nose to the grindstone.

But the sort of vision which we’re currently seeing from AGIMO just isn’t going to get it there.

Image credit: Pete Souza, public domain

Pay freezes and cuts for CIOs at Whitehall’s biggest departments

The Guardian — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 06:17:03 +0000

This article titled “Pay freezes and cuts for CIOs at Whitehall’s biggest departments” was written by Sade Laja, for guardian.co.uk on Wednesday 18th April 2012 14.38 UTC

A number of major Whitehall departments have slashed their CIO salaries since 2008, according to central government figures.

The salary of the Department for Work and Pensions’ (DWP) CIO, a job previously held by Joe Harley before his retirement at the end of March, was £265,000-£270,000 in 2008-09. By 2011, that figure had dropped to £225,000-£229,999.

Other falls in CIO pay since 2008 were seen at the Department for International Development, where the salary band decreased from £80,000-£84,000 in 2008-09 to £75,000-£79,999 from November 2011, and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, where CIO pay was £135,000-£140,000 in 2009-10, dropping to £120,000-£124,999 in November 2011.

The figures were published in response to freedom of information requests by Guardian Government Computing. Of the 16 departments questioned, eight reported CIO salaries either falling or remaining static in recent years.

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport, which paid its CIO the lowest salary of the departments that responded, also saw a decrease in the range of CIO pay: from £60,000-£65,000 in 2008-09 to its current rate of £55,000-£60,000.

The Department for Transport (DfT) also made salary cuts: its 2008-09 range was £145,000-£150,000, falling to £90,000-£95,000 in 2011. The DfT’s CIO role is combined with other responsibilities within the organisation, with the current CIO also working as managing director of motoring services.

The biggest fall in CIO pay came at the Cabinet Office, which slashed the salary band by more than half since 2008. Its CIO pay scale was £185,000-£190,000 in 2008-09, compared to £85,000-£90,000 in December 2011.

The Cabinet Office said that this drop in salary was due to the dual nature of the job, as in both 2008-09 and 2011 the Cabinet Office CIO also held another CIO position within the public sector. In 2008-09, the incumbent acted as both the government and Cabinet Office CIO, but from 2009-10 to December 2011, the holder of the post was deputy government CIO as well as Cabinet Office CIO, accounting for the decrease in pay, a spokeswoman for the department said.

The current government CIO, Andy Nelson, still holds a dual role, as CIO for the Ministry of Justice (MoJ). His salary is paid by the MoJ rather than the Cabinet Office, on a band of between £160,000-£164,000 at the end of 2011. The MoJ did not provide a salary band for 2008-09.

HM Treasury reported no change in its CIO salary band over the four years, with pay remaining at £58,200-£117,800 since 2008. The Department for Education’s CIO salary band has also been static at £135,000-£139,999 over the period.

Among the departments that provided like for like 2008-9 and 2011 figures, CIO salaries have fallen by 7% on average.

Elsewhere, several departments reported their CIO pay bands have risen slightly over the last four years:

• The Department for Energy and Climate Change saw the salary bracket of its CIO inch up from £75,000-£79,999 in 2008 to £85,000-£89,999 in 2011.

• The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills upped the pay scale of its CIO from £95,000-£99,999 in 2009, to £100,000-£104,999 in 2012.

• The Department for Communities and Local Government slightly increased its CIO pay band over the last four years from £57,300-£116,000 to £58,200-117,750.

• The Ministry of Defence CIO pay band has also remained fairly steady, going from £105,000-£109,999 in 2008-09 to £110,000-£114,999 in 2011-12.

The Department of Health provided a wide salary band for 2008-09 of £81,600-£160,000. At the time this post was held by Christine Connelly, who was solely CIO. By the end of 2011 the salary range had increased to £200,000-£204,999, as the CIO role was taken on by Katie Davis, who was also acting as the director general and managing director of NHS informatics.

The Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs revealed that its CIO post was filled by a consultant in 2008-09 and 2009-10, but did not disclose the salary for this period. However, the CIO pay for 2010-11 and 2011-12 was £85,000-£89,000.

The Home Office did not provide the 2008-09 salary of its CIO, but disclosed that Robin Pape’s pay stood at £110,000-£114,999 for 2011.

According to Adam Thilthorpe, director of professionalism at BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, there is an increasing need to retain quality CIOs, the “delivery agent of policy”, at central government level – potentially reflecting why some salary bands have remained steady over the last four years in the face of large cuts to the sector.

“I think CIOs are going to be critical for the UK government to be able to deliver on promises that are made from a policy point of view. Technology, ICT and information are so embedded and ubiquitous across all central government departments, you can see that not only in the world of opportunity, but also in the [online] threat environment,” he told Guardian Government Computing.

This article is published by Guardian Professional. For weekly updates on news, debate and best practice on public sector IT, join the Guardian Government Computing network here.

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Image credit: Max Romersa, royalty free

Hackers attempt News Corp break-in

Renai LeMay — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 03:24:26 +0000

news The Australian division of global media giant News Corporation has warned its staff to beware of attempts of external attackers who are seeking to “hack” into the company’s network.

The internal affairs of News Corp have been constantly in the global media spotlight over the past year, due to allegations of phone hacking carried out on behalf of journalists working for the company’s News of the World newspaper in the United Kingdom with the aim of sourcing private information about individuals such as celebrities. The allegations ultimately resulted in the closure of the newspaper and intense interest in the case from the UK Parliament.

A separate division of News Corp also made headlines in March this year, when Australian newspaper the Financial Review published the results of a four-year investigation alleging that a secretive News Corp unit had instructed hackers to hacking the smart cards of rival broadcasters, in a move that would aid News Corp in controlling Australia’s pay TV market. News Corp has denied the claims, and other media outlets such as the Global Mail have published stories displaying the complexity of the case.

However, according to an internal email sent by the technology chief of the company’s Australian division and seen by Delimiter, News Limited, the organisation is suffering its own problems with hackers. “Today a number of News Limited staff have received the below email which purports to be from our IT helpdesk,” the company’s chief information officer John Pittard wrote in a mass email to News Limited staff this morning. “This is a ‘phishing’ exercise by an external source who seeks to hack into our network.”

Phishing is the name given by the IT security industry to a technique by hackers attempting to acquire information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details through email. Typically the attacker will attempt to fool the recipient into thinking their email asking for details is a legitimate communication from, for example, their bank, or, in this case involving News Limited, the organisation’s internal IT helpdesk.

The email example forwarded by Pittard to News Ltd’s staff informs recipients that their account “is in the process of being upgraded to a newest of Windows-based servers”, including an “enhanced online email interface inline with internet infrastructure maintenance” and better anti-spam and anti-virus functions.

“To ensure that your account is not intermittently disrupted but active during and after this upgrade, you are required to kindly confirm your account by stating the details below,” it states, before asking for the recipient’s username and password. If recipients don’t respond with the details, the email claims that a “temporal deactivation” of their account from the “database” might occur.

Pittard told News Ltd staff who received the mail to contact the organisation’s National IT Service Centre (its IT helpdesk) who will assist with the issue. “News Limited will never ask you to divulge your password either by email or on the phone, so you should refuse to do so if you are ever asked,” the CIO wrote in his email.

It is unclear who has attempted to break into News Limited, but the generic nature of the phishing email — which contains several grammatical errors and does not mention News Limited specifically — suggests that that it may be part of a broader campaign targeting a number of organisations and not News Limited alone. A more targeted approach would be known as “spear phishing” and would target a specific organisation or a small number of individuals with a more detailed and personalised email fraud campaign.

However, it’s not the first time that hackers have attempted to target News Corp. In July 2011, the Internet hacking groups known as Anonymous and LulzSec released email login details of several former News of the World editors. That followed an earlier attack by LulzSec on the website of News Corp-owned The Sun, which saw the attackers plan a false story on the death of News Corp chief executive Rupert Murdoch. Denial of service attacks have also attempted to take down News Corp infrastructure such as web sites.

Image credit: World Economic Forum, Creative Commons

Data protection by design: CIOs’ response to new security challenges

The Guardian — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 04:33:18 +0000

This article titled “Data protection by design: CIOs’ response to new security challenges” was written by Mark Samuels, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 22nd March 2012 15.28 UTC

Protecting data is already a tough job for public sector chief information officers (CIOs) – and it’s only going to get tougher in future.

The European commission recently proposed a comprehensive reform of the EU’s 1995 data protection rules which, if it goes ahead, would have far-reaching effects for the way public sector bodies process personal data.

Such reforms would add a further layer of compliance for government CIOs, who must already deal with the demands of the information commissioner, freedom of information requests and the day-to-day need to keep user and staff data secure.

“It’s tough to know if public sector CIOs are already being more proactive in regards to information security,” says Dominic Batchelor, a partner at law firm Ashurst. “Data protection by design has only become fashionable during the past 12 to 18 months, but its popularity will continue to grow because of changes to the regulatory environment and the requirement for smarter data protection.”

Data protection by design aims to achieve a more proactive approach to security: it ensures no data is collected without the prior identification of a set business purpose and relies on a sound comprehension of the regulatory environment as well as a thorough understanding of organisational objectives.

Rather than being bolted on as an afterthought, privacy is set at the centre of a strategic approach that draws on a careful mix of technology, policy and people.

Kurt Frary, ICT architecture manager at Norfolk county council, says protection by design is the only possible way to manage public sector IT. “It’s not even a choice,” he says. “Modern CIOs have to create security by design if they want to do their job properly. We don’t have to convince people, either; security is absolutely core to our working culture.”

Frary’s strategy places security at the heart of every job role, with employees in Norfolk’s 240-strong IT department aware of their responsibilities. Job descriptions, for example, stipulate how and why an individual is responsible for a particular piece of kit, such as a server system. “We take a role-based approach to the way staff access systems. Security by design, and the opportunity to only access certain data defined by your specific role, is embedded in the way we work,” he says.

Dedicated managers, a security architect and an information architect report directly to Frary and help establish a security framework with different levels of policy. The framework is supported by a mixture of in-house technologies and tools provided through the council’s managed services agreement with BT.

The storage and use of an organisation’s information, rather than its security set up, creates a larger headache for public sector CIOs, Frary believes.

“When we’re considering whether to upgrade services, we have to take safe harbour considerations into account and make sure that data is not moving outside the EU,” he says, while potential fines from the information commissioner mean security must remain a priority for any public sector organisation.

Sander Kristel, CIO at Staffordshire county council, is also concentrating on information storage.

Data by design is theoretically the way forwards for information-swamped councils, but such an approach needs to be driven by customer need, according to Kristel, with attention directed towards the reasons for collecting, retaining and using customer data.

“Most organisations have taken the ‘protect all data’ approach, which is expensive from a technical perspective, but is easier from a process perspective,” says Kristel.

“Basically, government CIOs often secure a lot of data at the moment that is actually freely publicly available through freedom of information requests. If we do want to use cloud solutions in the public sector, it is really important to be more careful with the data we store before we make a decision.”

Centrally stipulated codes of connection are helping to create a platform for the types of technologies, policies and people processes that can drive data protection by design, the CIO says.

He believes codes stipulated through initiatives such as the Public Services Network will significantly improve customer service, while also working to reduce security risks and data duplication. But the continued use of such codes means CIOs must be proactive and understand how central policy impacts users at the local level.

“Data protection by design is going to be even more complex if we still need to comply with different codes of connection at the same time,” he says. “Cloud will inevitably mean that more of the information governance responsibilities will shift from IT teams to front line users. This shift will require simple, clear local policies and extensive training.”

This article is published by Guardian Professional. For weekly updates on news, debate and best practice on public sector IT, join the Guardian Government Computing network here.

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Apple and big data on the Horizon: the tech transformation under way at TfL

The Guardian — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 23:07:57 +0000

This article titled “Apple and big data on the Horizon: the tech transformation under way at TfL” was written by Jo Best, for guardian.co.uk on Friday 9th March 2012 12.10 UTC

Transport for London (TfL) may already be looking toward enabling London Underground workers to use Apple and Android devices below ground and the potential applications of big data within TfL, but on its immediate horizon is, well, Horizon.

Begun in January, Project Horizon seeks to merge TfL’s support functions such as HR and IT, which have historically operated in various places within the agency, into single units that deliver across the organisation.

Among the changes Horizon will bring is a merging of London Underground’s IT department and TfL’s group information management (IM) function.

“Looking forward, what we need is a cohesive single team you can go to, almost like a one stop shop for IT services. I don’t just mean just the IT management element of IT services, but how do you get things changed, how do you introduce new technologies, how are you going to make sure technology is enabling the organisation in efficient processes,” says Steve Townsend, TfL’s chief information officer (CIO).

“The role of Horizon was to look at not just how to structure our organisation charts, not just the way we deploy our technology, but predominantly the way we interface with our business. One of the areas we need to have in Transport for London going forward is a seamless business engagement function – in other words, that the organisation gets IM and IM gets the organisation,” he added.

Rather than having to deal with a number of different IT agencies to effect IT change, in future TfL staff will only need to talk to a single IM function who will deliver the change from start to finish. It’s a change that will streamline project delivery, according to the TfL CIO, but one that will necessitate a cultural change within the organisation.

“The cultural elements will need to be addressed to make sure people aren’t holding on to information, they’re not doing things behind closed doors, they’re sharing information – it’s a big cultural change, [to make sure] we are one team, and we have to act as one team with a common set of values.”

The success of Project Horizon in relation to IT will be seen in how it enables the IM function to interact with TfL at large. Rather than being perceived as a provider of services, Townsend hopes to see the department become more of a peer or partner to the rest of the organisation.

Historically, the IM function within TfL has not been as reliable as it might be, according to its CIO, who took up the role in 2011. “We’re sort of at the stage where those basics need to be addressed and we need to move out of that stage, to earn the right to be supplier of choice.”

Tackling the basics – making sure commodity services such as email, networks and printing work properly – will be the backbone of the stabilisation phase, the first stage of TfL’s current three-stage IT strategy, which will be followed by a period of consolidation and then innovation.

Consolidation and innovation

For its second phase, TfL can consolidate “most things, if not everything”, says Townsend, including both its commercial arrangements with suppliers and the technology it uses.

“We need to look at the amount of different technologies we have within the organisation. We have over a number years employed a proliferation of asset managements systems, real time information systems, different ways that we collect and mange data from a finance perspective… We are looking at core services consolidation, and then the obvious consolidation that sits underneath – the amount of datacentre space you have, the amount of servers you have, the amount of different types software you use.”

Innovation in turn will see the agency turning to the wider industry to help it improve transport within London, with mobility among Townsend’s top priorities for the phase.

“Where we have static information or information available at the desktop, we need to be putting that in the hands of our employees where they need it and in the hands of the travelling public where it’s right to do that.”

Both the consolidation and innovation phases will need the stabilisation work to be complete before they can proceed, and TfL’s IM function has given itself until after the Olympics to meet that goal.

“One thing this organisation definitely needs, no matter what discipline you look at, not just IT, is it needs to be stable and capable to get through the events of 2012,” Townsend said.

In its Olympics planning, TfL is expecting the strain put on its IT infrastructure during the Games to reach a level similar to that expected over the next 12 to 18 months in the course of normal service.

TfL has been running assurance models to see how its business-critical technology will cope with this spike in demand, and making changes to its infrastructure to strengthen it where necessary.

“The major risk is around capacity – how much more will be going on? Internally, will we get more questions asked of our customer service agents that stand on platforms, therefore the demand made on mobile technology internally, how much will that increase by?

“The other risk is, are our systems resilient enough? The capacity will push system harder so therefore there’s greater risk of failure, so therefore how fast can we recover at a time when we might potentially have more failures than normal?”

Once the Olympics are over, that capacity will remain in place rather than being scaled back down.

“All we’re doing is bringing forward our capacity and our resilience from a future year. We’re scaled for the next two years, which will allow us to maybe de-focus a little bit on the capacity and risk assurance issues and move closer to information management and get into the innovation part of it because our platforms are stronger and healthier.

“It’s great legacy, the fact that we’re bringing forward some of infrastructure-type projects,” Townsend says.

Wi-Fi and the advent of Apple

Another legacy of the Olympics will be Wi-Fi across London Underground. While it will enable the travelling public to use their mobile devices on the tube, TfL’s workers will also be making use of wireless connectivity underground, a move that ties into Townend’s mobility agenda, and which could also offer the opportunity to cut costs on both network equipment and terminals.

It could even, according Townsend, see Android, Windows Phone, or even Apple devices making their way into the hands of TfL workers.

“[Wi-Fi] gives us greater capabilities, it will shape our innovation path… You can make more people efficient, and more people mobile.”

He adds: “Am I thinking about an Apple deployment across the organisation? Yes, but not just Apple. Where Apple’s the best we should utilise it, but it’s not necessarily going to satisfy all our needs, there may be some Android devices that are very, very good for us, so therefore we should think about deploying those.”

Mobility also figures on TfL’s IT agenda in the form of mobile apps. As well as making its own apps, the agency makes its data – such as through its live journey planner API – available for use by third party developers.

The developers have taken the data and run with it, making apps that do everything from telling commuters which carriage to sit in order to be near the exit when their journey ends, to gamifying users’ daily commute.

But, while the popularity of London transport-based apps has allowed third party developers to take the strain of building some apps that would otherwise fall to TfL to create, it has also caused the organisation a different set of issues around the reliability of the apps, and could potentially conflict with TfL’s own aims.

“When a developer in his garage or at home develops an application, it is for their purpose – the output and way the information is displayed is an individual’s view of the world, and what is important to him therefore gets pushed forward. Obviously, we need to consider the direction and strategy of TfL and that can never be mixed in with some of those applications. That’s the elements that’s sometimes misleading for our travelling public,” says Townsend.

“I don’t think it’s wrong that developers make their own applications, we just need to make sure ones most popularly used by our travelling public are ones that reflect the direction of Transport for London.”

While app developers are experimenting with what new users they can put TfL’s data to, its CIO has his own ideas on what more could one day be done with it – and how it could see a future role for big data.

“Once we get our teeth into the innovation element, big data projects is a consideration,” he says, perhaps laying the foundations for smarter travel and “moving towards ‘this is what I want to do, how do I go about doing it’ rather than ‘I’m going to arrive in London, I’m going to get in a taxi and then I’m going to get on the tube’ – instead, here are alternatives that may fit your lifestyle better.”

Think of it, in Townsend’s words, as a journey planner on steroids. Not only could it mean users being educated about alternative travel options, it could help TfL cope with the ever-growing number of individuals taking trains, buses, tubes and boats, and the finite number vehicles it is able to provide on any given day.

“If we’re to progress, we need to be educating our travelling public into alternatives and we need to do that holistically. Big data should gives those options and drive different behaviours of people as they travel around London.”

This article is published by Guardian Professional. For weekly updates on news, debate and best practice on public sector IT, join the Guardian Government Computing network here.

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ING DIRECT rolls out Microsoft cloud deployment

Asha Jacob, Chillibreeze — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 00:03:04 +0000

news ING DIRECT Australia has deployed Bank in a Box, a private cloud infrastructure, in collaboration with systems integrator Dimension Data and backed by technical expertise from Cisco, NetApp and long-term partner, Microsoft. A case study published by Microsoft this month reveals the background to the technology deployment at ING DIRECT.

ING DIRECT Australia is the country’s fifth-largest mortgage lender with more than 1.5 million customers. The bank needed a cloud-enabled operating solution to reduce its development time-line and accelerate delivery of its new products and services, for a quicker delivery of innovative ideas – in short, for improved IT efficiency.

ING DIRECT’s earlier delivery model had limitations on how many concurrent projects and changes it could manage. The ING DIRECT team’s goal was to work towards providing a copy of the bank to anyone, at any time, for any purpose, at the lowest possible cost. This included the full set of the bank’s applications, services, configurations and 5.5 terabytes of data. Bank in a Box was the solution to achieve this goal – it was a fully integrated solution that would enable rapid provisioning of entire environments, speeding up time to market for new ideas.

Windows Server Hyper-V provided the foundational virtualisation platform that facilitated ING DIRECT’s transition to the cloud. The private cloud solution features datacentre infrastructure built on Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS), Cisco Nexus switching and NetApp storage with Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V virtualisation technology.

The case study (available in Word format here) claims that the solution reduced the time and cost associated with environment provisioning, and that has reduced the testing backlog appreciably. Andrew Henderson, CIO, ING DIRECT Australia stated: “The solution enables us to streamline processes that previously took eight people three months with a very simple self-service model.” Henderson further stated that the staff could now provision copies of the bank faster than before; new ideas could also be tested faster – all this giving ING DIRECT a competitive edge, he claimed.

Ben Issa, Head of IT Strategy, ING DIRECT Australia observed: “Our idea for the solution was unique, uniting technology from across the market to give us the capability to innovate and differentiate faster and better.” Issa added that Windows Server with Hyper-V and System Center (which helped coordinate the provisioning processes) helped ING DIRECT transform the bank’s datacentre environment into an automated, self-service private cloud.

Furthermore, the solution eliminated the need to build physical servers that required testing. Developers found it an efficient solution since Microsoft technologies were integrated into the private cloud.

The case study states that after successful pilot testing, ING DIRECT brought in Dimension Data to deliver the solution. Issa remarks that currently ING DIRECT uses the cloud based solution to meet different needs – from providing customer service representatives access to bank applications for training purposes to giving developers a full version of the bank at induction. Customer related or operational issues are easier to solve and the bank can redirect its skilled people and funds towards innovation.

ING DIRECT credited the close integration and collaborative relationship between Microsoft, Cisco, NetApp and Dimension Data in realizing the final vision of Bank in a Box. ING DIRECT is looking at deploying the solution globally this year in three of the bank’s locations.

opinion/analysis
There are two things which came to mind after reading this case study. The first was that virtualisation technology has truly come of age. To think that a bank could replicate its entire banking platform in a new instance for development purposes is remarkable. It will be fascinating to see what other uses of advanced virtualisation we see over the coming few years, and how the technology itself evolves.

Secondly, as with another major deployment with Coles revealed by Microsoft last week, it is fascinating to see that it is predominantly Microsoft infrastructure platforms being used here — not those from rival suppliers such as VMware. I have no doubt that this kind of rollout could also have been done with VMware — and I’m sure ING DIRECT, like virtually every major organisation in Australia, is also a heavy user of VMware. But it does show the extent to which corporate Australia is starting to use Hyper-V more and more at the moment.

Opinion/analysis by Renai LeMay

Mapping out the NBN Co IT paradigm

Renai LeMay — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 22:30:23 +0000

feature When it comes to selecting IT platforms and partners to support its business mission, the Federal Government-owned National Broadband Network Company faces a somewhat unique set of problems and opportunities.

When most organisations go through this kind of internal IT infrastructure rollout, they have to do so with the awareness of either a certain degree of legacy, in the case of a large organisation with an established history of operations, or they have to do so with the awareness of starting small, with limited resources that will scale up over time as the organisation grows — in the case of a startup.

But NBN Co faces neither of these issues.

Like many startups, the company has kicked off its operations from scratch — with a blank slate on which to paint a picture of what it may look like in future. There’s no legacy IT environment at NBN Co to worry about; no ageing servers located in branch offices to rationalise; no mainframe applications dating back to the 1990′s which need to be modernised; no datasets in unusual formats which need converting.

However, the company also has very few constraints. With its Federal Government shareholders having committed to ploughing tens of billions of dollars into its operations and a timeline that stretches off for many decades, the company can afford to think large, long and premium — it can afford the best, and to get the best value for its money over the next several decades as it rolls out broadband infrastructure around Australia, it should probably try not to compromise on technology issues. If it does, those same issues will likely come back to bite it a few years down the track.

To many in Australia’s IT industry, it might sound like the perfect problem to have — a mandate to spend a solid budget on the best technology solutions, in a company focused on technology itself. But according to the company’s general manager of enterprise architecture, Bill Barnett (pictured, right), NBN Co’s situation comes with its own set of issues.

“To some degree, it’s easier to find a piece from an existing puzzle than having to draw the puzzle from scratch,” he says in a recent interview.

Some of the questions which NBN Co’s fledgling team of IT executives have faced over the past several years, as it has established and ramped up its operations, go right to heart of the technology decision-making process.

For example, the company has faced the issue of whether to select individual best of breed solution sets and vendors for each piece of that IT puzzle (for example, telecommunications billing and service management, HR, financial, procurement, ERP and CRM systems, unified communications, server hardware and software, business analytics and more), or whether to pick a smaller number of vendors which could offer the company integrated solutions branching across various areas.

It was important that the solutions which NBN Co picked were also not fly by night options — with NBN Co’s long time frames in mind, the companies concerned would need to be along for the long haul. And they would also need to have strong partner ecosystems to aid with systems integration.

However, according to Bartnett and fellow NBN Co staffer Simon Jackson (the company’s general manager for business and commercial platforms), point out, there wasn’t much time to evaluate those products or get them up and running. In many cases, the platforms they chose would have to be up and running before the NBN Co business units were in place that would be using them.

“We stood these suites up before we had functioning business units — certainly before we had business processes,” Barnett says. The products just had to work out of the box — and they had to work quickly.

Exacerbating the situation was the fact that the staff choosing and implementing the solutions were new to NBN Co themselves. NBN Co has made a point of hiring many of the best and most experienced technical staff in Australia’s technology sector. However, if you trawl through the resumes of the hundreds of staff now working at the company (a good way to do this is by searching professional social network LinkedIn), you’ll see most of the company’s staff only have a year or so experience at the fledgling company. If you’ve been at NBN Co for more than a year, you’re a veteran — and if you’ve been there for at least two, you’ve probably already been promoted once.

Barnett says in the early days there was no established problem-solving mechanism for reaching agreement on some technical decisions — and in the “early days”, if a new staff member was hired for a particular skillset, they would need to demonstrate that expertise by using it — and quickly so. Barnett himself has only been at NBN Co since February 2010 (a scant six months after the company was established), and Jackson even less time — since January 2011.

One final factor also complicated NBN Co’s IT infrastructure design process.

Jackson says although in many ways NBN Co’s staff hadn’t anticipated the challenges they would face in designing its IT environment, aside from “very conceptual” industry standard models that it could draw on, it also didn’t want to take too much of an orthodox path in that process.

“We also want to make sure we challenge the model,” he says, noting it would be a “lost opportunity” for NBN Co’s staff to simply replicate existing IT infrastructure models without examining some of their underpinning assumptions. Staff asked themselves what “should” be best practice, he said — going back to basics and examining the business processes they were trying to map.

Some of those decisions were initially relatively easy. In late 2009, shortly after NBN Co was established, it rapidly inked a series of contracts with diversified IT products and services group Data#3 in the areas of procurement, office software, designing and implementing an office LAN/WAN environment and deploying a hosted, managed Microsoft Outlook/Exchange email platform. These were the first building blocks in what would become NBN Co’s internal IT infrastructure.

Others soon followed.

In March 2010 Accenture won the right to provide NBN Co with a hosted HR platform, in November that year NBN Co picked Global Switch’s mammoth Sydney facility as its prime datacentre, shortly after it was announced that the cloud infrastructure consortium consisting of VMware, Cisco and EMC (VCE) would kit out that datacentre, and in March 2011 one of the company’s largest deals was signed, with the announcement that IBM would build NBN Co’s business and operational support systems, in a deal worth some $200 million.

In May that year NBN Co added Citrix desktop virtualisation software to its list, and in June it handed support for the desktop systems which Data#3 rolled out to Japanese vendor Fujitsu.

And — although it was known that Oracle had been key to NBN Co for some time — in January this year it was revealed that Larry Ellison’s team would provide the software supporting NBN Co … with a plethora of Oracle applications ranging from CRM on Demand to E-Business Suite, from Business Intelligence to Identity Management 11g and even Primavera having been bedded in at NBN Co. The US software giant also named NBN Co chief information officer Claire Rawlins as CIO of the year at its OpenWorld confab in San Francisco — and with the complexity and breadth of NBN Co’s Oracle rollout, it’s not hard to see why.

And of course — although it’s outside the scope of this article, being customer-focused telco infrastructure rather than IT gear — none of this is taking into account the mammoth network infrastructure rollout contracts which NBN Co has signed with several handfuls of other firms, in areas such as fibre, wireless and satellite.

Examining why NBN Co picked Oracle for so many of its internal IT systems helps give onlookers an understanding of the way the company’s IT management has been thinking over those past few turbulent years.

Barnett and Jackson describe the vendor as a ‘strategic partner’ whose solutions in many cases can provide the bulk of what NBN Co was looking for. The company didn’t spend a lot of time looking for best of breed products — but rather for integrated suites which would provide 85 percent or more of what it needed — a “broad sweep of functionality”.

“We needed a set of very basic but mature capabilities around HR, finance and procurement,” says Jackson. “Enterprise capabilities which were very robust, highly auditable — and plug and play solutions”. He adds that NBN Co closely examined the vanilla features available from the various suites. “We don’t need to have a differentiating proposition,” he adds — NBN Co being a monopoly player in its space.

The pair won’t say specifically which vendors they examined in the crowded business software space. However, Barnett says, there are obviously “two titans” in the area — by which he likely refers to Oracle and arch-rival SAP — as well as some players “around the edges”.

Jackson says there are places for all options in the business software marketplace — and CIOs “need to make a call themselves” on what’s suitable for their business, whether that be a best of breed vendor or an integrated suite such as that provided by Oracle and SAP. In NBN Co’s case, the suite approach “really matches and supports our strategies”, he says, but for a number of organisations it may be different — they may look at a best of breed requirement instead.

However, even though NBN Co picked a large, well-supported vendor like Oracle to support many of its platforms, that doesn’t mean the US software giant won the deal easily.

Barnett and Jackson say it was important for them to examine Oracle’s (notoriously torturously complex) future development roadmap, and NBN Co is actively working with the software giant on how that roadmap would develop in future. In this light, NBN Co has an obvious and unique ability to contribute towards Oracle’s development plans — for example, helping the company develop its wholesale capabilities. NBN Co will, after all, be one of the world’s first pure wholesale telecommunications monopolies developed from scratch.

In addition, Jackson (pictured, left) says, NBN Co has developed a strong focus on internal identity management. “We’re probably one of the leaders of single sign-on globally,” he says.

Other choices which NBN Co made revolved around the choice of whether to deploy in-house, managed or completely externally hosted platforms. Notably, the company has chosen Oracle’s CRM on Demand platform, which many would consider inferior to a best of breed platform such as Salesforce.com. Oracle isn’t known for its software as a service capabilities, but recently established a CRM on Demand node with local company Harbour MSP, which also uses the Global Switch datacentre in Pyrmont, Sydney. And of course, its email platform is also remotely hosted.

“Buy versus rent is a really interesting conversation,” says Barnett. “The fact that you can take on a product with no datacentre footprint, no investment in your technical staff. I think the business case for that is incredibly compelling. I think we’re finding that the options in the market are getting rapidly more mature.”

Of course, there are still “issues around where the data is housed, and where the processing is occurring” — issues which would likely prevent NBN Co from hosting too much of its data offshore, as a quasi-government organisation. However it’s not too hard to see the company shifting some lower-priority workloads off to other partners at some stage in the future — particularly as it has had a highly virtualised IT infrastructure right from the start.

At the end of the day, NBN Co’s internal IT systems are an evolving beast. With some unique challenges — dealing with massive and rapid growth, dealing with a brand new workforce, and even dealing with a fairly unique business model — NBN Co’s is always going to be a unique IT environment which will require both orthodox and outside the box thinking.

Looming over everything, of course, is the prospect that the project may be dramatically modified if the Coalition wins the next Federal Election and changes the project’s mission — and NBN Co itself — drastically. Those who work at NBN Co are aware — and particularly so after the last knife-edge election in 2010 — that much of what they do may be for nought in a few years.

But it’s still early days for the organisation yet, and speaking to its IT executives, it’s hard not to get a sense that some great work is being done. There’s a huge sense of optimism in the air, and an appetite for facing technical challenges head-on. Apple founder Steve Jobs might have found a lot to like at NBN Co — in many ways, it appears to be a company of “A players” — the elite.

“The team that’s here, pretty much, everybody self-selected to come to this kind of environment,” says Barnett. “You don’t have anyone who’s trying to coast along with the organisation. I don’t want to sound like it’s Kumbaya … but we’re really excited about working together to get the best outcome for the business.” And in any business, that’s what building internal IT infrastructure should fundamentally be all about.

Image credit: NBN Co, Bill Barnett and Simon Jackson

Recruiter picks Telstra for cloud, telco services

Navina Anand, Chillibreeze — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 23:07:45 +0000

news Recruitment and HR services provider Randstad has signed a three-year deal with Telstra, to provide telecommunication services and transition the company into a cloud-computing model.

Under the agreement Randstad will gradually transition to cloud computing services from Telstra allowing Randstad to maximise the return on investment from its legacy hardware. As part of the agreement, Telstra will also provide Next G mobile phones and 4G enterprise mobile broadband services; manage and connect Randstad’s 50 offices to the Telstra Next IP Network; and roll out Telstra IP Telephony to its 1000-strong workforce.

Chief information officer of Randstad, Kevin O’Neill, said that since much of the IT infrastructure currently at Randstad was reaching the end of its lifecycle, instead of deploying new infrastructure, it was the perfect time for the company to transition to latest technologies like cloud computing. “We now have the opportunity to maximise our existing investments in hardware whilst transitioning to a local, secure and proven cloud-computing model in the mid-term. The scalability and flexibility benefits of the cloud model in particular, support our growth strategy within the Asia-Pacific region,” O’Neill said.

O’Neill also said that Randstad could leverage Telstra’s 4G network to enable its employees to utilise new data-rich services for improving connectivity and collaboration. What the company needed was reliable, secure and consistent network performance across their business, whether its consultants or clients were located in metropolitan hubs or remote locations. He believed that Telstra had the proven capability to deliver this.

Randstad’s disaster recovery capabilities were improved, during the Queensland floods, because its staff was able to work efficiently, albeit remotely, using Telstra’s mobile data network, minimizing the detrimental impact on Randstad’s business.

Paul Geason, Group Managing Director, Telstra Enterprise & Government, said the deal would modernise Randstad’s working practices and lay the groundwork for an IT infrastructure and software model that would prepare the company for the next decade. He also said that Telstra was investing more than $800 million in cloud computing in the next few years and that Randstad would benefit directly from this investment.

Telstra recently received Red Hat Linux certification for its public cloud offering and earlier, had bagged other large contracts in the cloud space including deals with Komatsu Australia, packaging giant Visy etc.

In October 2010, when Telstra announced a flagship cloud computing partnership with IT services giant Accenture, the future of the new generation of cloud computing services in Australia was a little unclear. With some early wins and lessons under its belt, Telstra’s cloud computing offering were seeing enough traction to make the offerings long-term propositions, the telco said at the time.

opinion/analysis
To be honest I’m a little uncomfortable with Telstra’s description of cloud computing services here. Although it does seem as though the telco is handling some server infrastructure for Randstad, it should be pointed out that mobile broadband services, IP telephony, telecommunications transit and similar services do not constitute cloud computing. These are telecommunications services and should be labelled as such. Telstra’s attempt to conflate these services with cloud computing is misleading — and it’s important to note that in its media release, Telstra doesn’t actually state what cloud computing services specifically Randstad is buying.

Update: A Telstra spokesperson has clarified that the company wasn’t attempting to conflate its telecom services with cloud computing. Randstad, the spokesperson said, will, subject to the lifecycle of its legacy equipment, eventually move into the Telstra cloud. Initially the company has moved to co-location and cloud for redundancy purposes.

Image credit: Fred Fokkelman, royalty free. Opinion/analysis by Renai LeMay