Delimiter » cloud computing

SAP’s SuccessFactors deploys Aussie datacentre

Renai LeMay — Wed, 23 May 2012 02:54:42 +0000

news SAP subsidiary SuccessFactors has opened a datacentre located in Australia from which it will sell its software as a service-based human resource management and business execution software to local customers, in one of the first known deployments of such dedicated Australian infrastructure by a global SaaS vendor.

In a statement issued this morning, the company said it “today announced the opening of its new datacentre in Australia as part of its commitment to the market and the Asia-Pacific region.” The facility will be located in Sydney and is a certified facility under the Federal Government’s purchasing guidelines, as well as adhering to relevant ISO standards.

“The Sydney datacentre will host the full SuccessFactors Business Execution (BizX) suite, including Jam, Workforce Planning, Workforce Analytics, Performance & Goals, Employee Central, Recruiting Management, Succession & Development, Compensation Management and Learning Management, which will all be delivered locally in the Australian cloud to clients throughout the Asia Pacific region – the fastest growing region for SuccessFactors globally,” the company said. “With demand for cloud-based solutions growing quickly, SuccessFactors is keen to fully expand into the market and maximise its local presence.”

“The new datacentre opening comes at a perfect time as it is designed to meet the rapidly growing hosting demands of the Australian government and local businesses customers,” said Murray Sargant, SuccessFactors vice president, Asia Pacific. “We have a very strong presence in Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne and Brisbane, so many of our customers will find it helpful to have access to a datacentre which offers premium support and optimal reliability in the country. We are committed to advancing Australia as a cloud computing hub for the region and we are very excited about the growth potential the datacentre will bring to the APAC market.”

The rollout of dedicated Australian datacentre infrastructure by SuccessFactors is a rarity in the SaaS market. Companies such as Microsoft, Salesforce.com, SAP, Google and Netsuite, which all sell SaaS-based enterprise IT services into Australia, do so from datacentres located in other countries such as Singapore, Hong Kong and the US, and have repeatedly declined to build local infrastructure.

The lack of on-shore IT infrastructure is particularly seen as limiting the ability of the public and financial services sectors — which are both large consumers of IT services in Australia — from deploying SaaS-style solutions. The issue has been repeatedly debated over the past several years.

In May 2011, for example, Victoria’s privacy commissioner issued a stark warning to government agencies about the use of cloud computing, warning that it may be “impossible” to protect personal information held about Australians when it was located offshore — or even just outside Victoria.

And in April this year, the United States’ global trade representative strongly criticised a perceived preference on the part of large Australian organisations for hosting their data on-shore in Australia, claiming it created a significant trade barrier for US technology firms and was based on a misinterpretation of the US Patriot Act.

However, where companies have deployed on-shore solutions, they have often been a success. In January this year, Oracle announced that various top Australian public and private sector entities had implemented its CRM On Demand software as a service suite, which has an Australia-hosted version, unlike many of its rivals.

Local customers who have been provisioned in the 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 the rollout of the CRM On Demand platform for Telstra Wholesale. Telstra had elaborated then that it had chosen Oracle CRM On Demand because of its easy integration with the company’s existing IT infrastructure, such as Oracle’s Siebel software that helps manage billing for Telstra’s retail customers.

opinion/analysis
It’s fantastic to see SuccessFactors open an Australian datacentre; I welcome the move and I congratulate SuccessFactors on sailing against the conventional wisdom in this area. I can really only view this as a move stemming from the extreme reluctance which Australian government departments have in using offshore options. The public sector would be a key target for SuccessFactors, and it’s hard to see how the organisation would have gotten much traction in that segment of the market without local hosting.

Some will see SuccessFactor’s move as a limited test which could lead to a similar local rollout by SAP, and it’s true that the company has been considering the issue recently. But I would be cautious about making this kind of assumption. SuccessFactors has remained quite separate from the rest of the SAP business, and as I’ve previously written, the argument from SAP’s management would be that Australian customers can already buy hosted SAP services from partners such as Fujitsu and Oxygen. SAP tends to be quite a rigid organisation at times, and I would be very surprised to see the company push hard into on-shore SaaS any time soon.

Image credit: SuccessFactors

Govt pushes ahead with cloud-sharing approach

Renai LeMay — Tue, 22 May 2012 06:18:11 +0000

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

The community cloud model is one of several cloud computing approaches which the Federal Government is currently exploring, under a collaborative approach between centralised IT strategy agency the Australian Government Information Management Office and a number of other major and minor departments and agencies.

The model is different from both the public cloud (where various unrelated organisations share public IT infrastructure) and private cloud (where a single organisation provides a common private pool of infrastructure to its own workers and internal departments) models, in that it envisions IT infrastructure being provided by large departments within the Federal Government being somewhat standardised so that smaller departments and agencies can also gain access to IT infrastructure.

In doing so, it recognises the fact that in Australia’s Federal Government, large departments such as the Australian Taxation Office, Department of Human Services (including Centrelink), and Department of Immigration and Citizenship already operate large amounts of IT infrastructure and maintain standardised processes for accessing that infrastructure, and that it might make sense for smaller agencies to be able to take advantage of it.

In a blog post on AGIMO’s blog today, AGIMO first assistant secretary Glenn Archer, who leads cloud computing work for the agency, published a draft of a better practice guide for community cloud governance.

“The purpose of this guide is to provide agencies with guidance on providing a governance structure around Community Clouds,” wrote Archer. “It is based around related frameworks using formal agreements that are managed by well-defined governance structures with clear roles and responsibilities. It is important that agencies providing cloud services and those agencies consuming those cloud services have a common understanding of the features and how the service is managed.”

The guide calls for formal agreements to be put in place between agencies that are interested in sharing their clouds, as well as setting up a governance committee and model to manage the use of the IT platforms concerned.

Some of the issues to be considered by agencies considering being involved in cloud sharing include security classifications (for example, a community cloud may operate at various security classification levels which may not be appropriate for the storage of all data sets), the need for standards around interoperability and data portability, and the need to comply with appropriate legislative and regulatory requirements.

It gives examples of governance structures that could be used for community clouds, including the establishment of a community cloud management committee composed of representatives from the lead agency concerned, participating agencies, and involved service providers. Such committees would be overseen by the Federal Government’s existing Cloud Information Community group, as well as the Chief Information Officers’ Committee and Secretaries’ ICT Governance Board groups.

The publication of the guide comes some 18 months after the issue of shared government cloud computing resources was first raised in public by then-Human Services deputy secretary of IT infrastructure John Wadeson (since retired), who told iTNews at the time that departmental CIOs were informally investigating the ability to share computing capacity.

The New South Wales State Government is also investigating the area. Its wide-ranging IT strategy published several weeks ago called for the implementation of virtualisation technology in all government agencies, and the development of a trusted Government private cloud.

opinion/analysis
I think the idea of community cloud computing is a fantastic one, and a very wise way to unify the two strands of agency-centric IT decision-making in the Federal Government with the need for greater provision and use of common resources across government.

It has long been the case in governments that virtually all of the decision-making ability when it comes to IT infrastructure has been concentrated in agencies rather than in centralised whole of government chief information officer roles. The CIO of the Australian Taxation Office, for example, or of DHS, is hardly going to just hand over control of their IT resources to a central government CIO, when they have their own departmental secretary or chief executive to answer to. And yet, this siloed approach has also meant that the opportunity to set IT policy and use common resources across the whole public sector has often been lost.

The community cloud represents the best of both scenarios. Major centres of IT excellence within the Federal Government can maintain control over their own destinies, while also sharing some of their resources and learnings with what I would call ‘satellite’ agencies; smaller groups which don’t have the same scale but can benefit from it by being a little closer to the centre of things.

I would love to see this principle extended further in governments right around Australia. Perhaps a little of this same approach would help state governments out of the IT shared services mess which they currently find themselves in.

Image credit: Fred Fokkelman, royalty free.

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Three lessons ING’s private cloud teaches us

External Contributor — Tue, 15 May 2012 05:25:31 +0000

This sponsored post is written by Phil Goldie, Business Group Lead at Microsoft Australia. Click here to find out more about Microsoft’s private cloud solutions.

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

That’s the question which ING Direct’s team of software developers are now facing, after the bank successfully (with the assistance of Microsoft, Cisco, NetApp and Dimension Data) implemented a private cloud solution to virtualise its entire banking platform. Combined with automated deployment tools, what this means is that the bank is literally able to provision a new copy of itself — a so-called ‘bank in a box’ — within minutes.

Now, I don’t want to go too far into detail about that deployment for this blog post; it’s already been comprehensively covered in articles on iTNews, The AustralianIT and Delimiter, as well as in a case study produced by Microsoft.

However, what I do want to do is start a bit of a discussion around what the implications are for other major organisations from this new style of deployment, and why it’s so different from the kind of advanced virtualisation or Infrastructure as a Service solutions which are what we’ve mainly been talking about in Australia over the past several years, when we talk about the term ‘private cloud’. With this in mind, here’s three things we can learn from ING’s recent private cloud deployment.

1. The cloud argument isn’t always about cost

ING Direct’s private cloud rollout wasn’t about taking cost out of the business, which is often the argument around cloud computing. Instead, it was a project driven to address a higher level business issue.

ING Direct’s basic problem was that it had a team of developers which wanted to innovate: Fixing bugs, developing new online banking features, and launching new customer applications. To do so, those developers needed development environments that were segregated from the bank’s production systems. ING Direct was capable of deploying such environments. But, given the complexity and interconnectedness of any modern banking platform, it used to take three months and eight full-time staff to deploy them. Not exactly an ideal situation.

This had created a situation where the bank’s ability to innovate and progress its systems had become stifled, with an extensive backlog of development work pending. It wasn’t easy, but through its private cloud deployment, the bank was able to get around that issue and provide a new copy of its platform to any developer who wanted it. This unlocked ING Direct’s ability to be agile and innovate; it sped up its time to market. Consequently, the project was viewed internally as a strategic business enabler, and received top-level executive support right throughout its life, rather than being viewed merely as another infrastructure project.

2. It’s OK to think big

Every time ING Direct provisions a new ‘bank in a box’ for a developer, it switches on around 220 new virtual machines in total, and duplicates around 5.5 terabytes of data. IT departments are now pretty much used to the concept of provisioning new virtual machines — even dozens of them — and allocating storage to them. But hundreds of new virtual machines? Every time a developer needs a new testing environment? Most IT managers would run in horror from such a concept. To many, it would seem like using an axe to fix a problem requiring a scalpel.

But when you consider how much effort it took ING Direct previously to stand up testing environments of this nature, the axe starts to look like a good idea. The reason this is possible is the increasing maturity of automation tools like Microsoft’s System Center 2012, which let you provision large numbers of new virtual environments in a much more streamlined fashion than was previously possible.

Right now, a new class of ‘workflow’ or ‘automation’ developers are emerging, who are building solutions on top of platforms like System Center. Their work is unlocking the value of such automation tools in sizable environments so that others can make full use of them. This means that it’s becoming increasingly possible to provision very complex environments — such as a whole ‘bank in a box’ — in an automated fashion. This would have been unthinkable only a few years ago.

3. Focus on where the pain is

Now sure, not every company has a whole banking platform sitting in their datacentre, and a team of several dozen developers who need to test against it. But there are still immediate implications from ING Direct’s style of private cloud deployment for many other types of organisations, both in Australia and globally.

In the manufacturing and retail sectors, for example, IT organisations are struggling with similar questions regarding development around their enterprise resource planning (ERP) platforms. Many government organisations operate giant databases and record-keeping systems which need to interface with each other and with the private sector. In telecommunications, it’s often billing and provisioning systems which sit at the core. Dynamic education environments such as universities sometimes have to stand up new systems in only a short period as a new campus or faculty opens, or as a new wave of courses come online.

In all of these sectors, there are times when laborious work regularly slows down organisations’ time to market. In ING’s case, it was provisioning new development environments. In other sectors, the business might have different requirements, such as provisioning a new environment for a new brand, geographic storefront rollout, or product launch. In all of these areas, automation might be able to save effort and cut the time to market. But in each case, focusing on where the pain is will help elevate the conversation around private cloud deployments beyond a discussion about IT infrastructure and towards one about direct business benefits.

Often, as was the case with ING Direct, early successes in this area can also unlock future projects. The bank’s successful private cloud rollout in Australia has stimulated an internal conversation about how the technology can be deployed globally. And it’s also looking at how it can further automate other internal applications and processes, taking advantage of the techniques it’s already developed with its banking platform. It’s this kind of ongoing revolution that cloud computing should be all about.

What good examples of cloud deployments have you seen in Australia? What do you think are the most interesting aspects of cloud computing? Click here to find out more about Microsoft’s private cloud solutions.

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SAP considers Aussie datacentre

Renai LeMay — Tue, 15 May 2012 04:01:24 +0000

blog The Financial Review has reported that German software giant SAP is likely to build an Australian datacentre to provide services to Australian organisations, should new privacy legislation pass that could affect vendors’ ability to sell cloud computing services locally from global facilities. The publication wrote this morning (we recommend you click here for the full article):

Co- chief executive Jim Hagemann Snabe told the AFR that laws providing more data privacy for users were an important and positive step and that SAP was set to build a local data centre. “[If the laws are passed], then it is very likely,” he said.

Now, I don’t believe that all aspects of the Financial Review’s article on this subject are accurate. For example, I don’t think it’s realistic that privacy legislation being introduced by the Federal Government could stop technology companies providing Australians with cloud computing or software a service solutions from offshore datacentres. Think of the millions of Australians who still use Hotmail, for example; any such law would just be completely unworkable in practice.

However, there is significant incentive for SAP to invest in Australian infrastructure. Its major rival Oracle has already done so through its partner HarbourMSP, after all, and Salesforce.com and Netsuite have long been considering similar deployments (although in practice these considerations haven’t actually resulted in much yet). In addition, the company already sells its Business ByDesign SaaS product locally and has signed up a number of local customers for it already, despite having only launched it in Australia in August last year. Partners such as Fujitsu and UXC’s Oxygen also offer hosted SAP services locally.

Of course, as with all such claims of future Australian technology infrastructure, we’ll believe it when we see it.

Image credit: Ceiling, Creative Commons, SAP

Optus a “disgusting” company, says AFL chief

Renai LeMay — Mon, 14 May 2012 06:03:27 +0000

blog AFL chief Andrew Demetriou has reportedly stuck the boot into Optus in its appeal in the ongoing legal drama over the telco’s TV Now Internet TV recording system, labelling the company “a disgusting organisation” which was undermining the rights of sports companies. The AFL’s own media outlet AFL Media, in an article published late last week, quoted Demetriou as saying:

“They are a disgusting organisation who is acting reprehensibly again and now putting more uncertainty into sports and broadcast rights going forward … I’m really disappointed and disgusted in the comments of their CEO overnight.”

Demetriou’s comments came after Optus last week revealed it would appeal its Federal Court loss over the TV Now service, taking the case to the High Court. At the time, Optus chief executive Paul O’Sullivan said Optus believed the TV Now case was “extremely important in deciding the future for innovation, consumer choice and competition”.

He added: “This is a very important public policy issue that needs to be determined by the highest court in the land, to give clarity to both consumers and the industry. As innovations like TV Now are readily available in other parts of the world, Australia must remain globally competitive and embrace the rapid convergence of technologies as we head towards an NBN world.”

The Optus TV Now service allows customers to have free to air television programs recorded when broadcast, using Optus’ centralised systems, and then played back at the time of a customers’ choosing on their Optus mobile device or PC. This technique is known as “time-shifting”, and attracted the legal ire of the NRL and other groups such as the Australian Football League, which had granted Optus rival Telstra an exclusive licence to make their broadcasts available online.

Frankly, I think both organisations are acting a little immaturely here. Optus can’t have expected that the AFL and NRL would take its cloud-based PVR service lightly, considering their multi-million-dollar deal with Telstra. Football is big money. But the sports codes are also acting in a silly manner; trying to deny Australians from accessing sports content through any medium they wish, and at the time of their choosing, is an exercise in futility. In a few years, when global intellectual property laws are finally re-worked to reflect real-world Internet usage, we will look back on this spat as a bad joke born of a flawed understanding of the digital environment, I would bet.

Image credit: Flying Cloud, Creative Commons

NSW agencies push very hard for SaaS rollouts

Renai LeMay — Mon, 14 May 2012 05:12:44 +0000

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

Australia’s public sector has in the past notoriously been averse to purchasing IT solutions which are delivered as a service.

While pure play SaaS vendors such as Salesforce.com, Google, Netsuite and others have experienced a solid level of success in various aspects of Australia’s private sector with their solutions, which are typically delivered through a web browser rather than hosted on a customers’ premises, the fact that most such services have been hosted offshore has prevented such companies from making strong in-roads into Australian governments at any level — federal, state and local. Similarly, companies such as Microsoft, Oracle and SAP which offer both SaaS and on-premises models have continued to see strong public sector demand for their traditional solutions, with only slow uptake of their SaaS options.

However, if the NSW Government has its way, much of this may be about to change. Over the past few months, several major NSW Government agencies have kicked off large IT purchasing initaitives which specifically highlight a preference for SaaS solutions, as opposed to on-premises deployments.

The most recent of these tendering initiatives was kicked off in late April by the NSW Department of Trade and Investment, one of the new super-agencies, or ‘department clusters’ created when the new Coalition NSW Government won power in March 2011. In tender documents released in April, the department revealed that the creation of this new umbrella department brought together a range of “disparate systems, data and shared services provision”. “As a result,” it added, “NSW Trade and Investment is carrying significant operational risk such as effective controls, audit compliance, lack of informed decision-making capability and inadequate reporting.”

Because of this, the department wrote, it wanted to source a new overarching enterprise resource planning system, with a target date for implementation of December 2012. “The purpose of the project is to provide a prerequisite minimum capability and technology platform to integrate people, processes and technology into the new whole of cluster mode of operation,” it said. The rollout will affect some 7,000 total staff.

In the past, such initiatives would generally have been rolled out as on-premises solutions, with companies like Oracle and SAP providing the technology and integrators like IBM, Fujitsu, HP or others doing the leg work. However, in this case the department noted it specifically wanted a SaaS platform. “A SaaS ERP solution has been identified as the preferred model to transition NSW Trade and Investment to a single integrated platform,” the tender documents state.

Across town, another NSW super-agency, Transport for NSW (which was formed from the merger of the NSW RTA, maritime, transport construction authority and Country Rail groups) is also currently talking to the industry about SaaS packages.

The tender documents have now gone offline, but an article by ZDNet.com.au details the fact that in March, the agency went to the market with a proposal to abandon in-house infrastructure and migrate 35,000 email accounts, 25,000 desktop environments and some 2,000 BlackBerry devices to new systems, all labelled “as a service”. ZDNet quoted Transport NSW’s tender documents as follows:

“The group CIO is actively promoting a strategy of ‘as a service’, recognising the potential for leveraging the economies of scale and expertise of the private sector in the delivery of core technology platforms and capabilities to government.”

According to the NSW Government’s tendering site, a large group of IT suppliers have responded to the request. The companies who are interested are: AC3, Capgemini, Citrix, CPW Group, CSC, Data#3, Datacom, Dell, Dimension Data, Ethan Group, Fujitsu, HP, Housley Consulting, IBM, Microsoft, Mnet, NEC, Optus, PolicyPoint, SAP, Satyam, Sybase, Telstra, UXC and VMware.

The ZDNet article doesn’t mention whether on- or off-shore hosting is a key issue for Transport for NSW, but there is no doubt the organisation will consider the location of data hosting during its procurement process. However, if the organisation takes its lead from the NSW Department of Trade and Investment, location may not turn out to be such a headache.

In the tender documents associated with its SaaS ERP procurement effort, the NSW Department of Trade and Investment specifically explores the issue of data hosting. And there is a great deal of good news for vendors with offshore datacentres. The department notes that vendors will need to provide details of their arrangements for data hosting, including the “data storage location”. However, it also mentions that vendors should detail “options for data replication in Australia”.

This is a small, one-line clause in the department’s document, but in the wider debate about Australia’s public sector hosting data offshore, it’s an important clause. It appears to reveal that the NSW Department of Trade and Investment is working under an assumption that data will be stored offshore in an SaaS ERP scenario, with data being replicated in Australia for backup and other purposes.

This approach marks a sharp departure from the general approach taken by Australia’s public sector; which has been characterised in the past by a strong desire for data to be hosted onshore, within Australia’s legal jurisdiction. If the NSW SaaS projects are successfully rolled out over the next year, this may provide the stimulus for agencies in other jurisdictions to deploy similar SaaS projects.

The news comes as the NSW Government a little over a week ago revealed a new wide-ranging ICT strategy, which it said was slated to make it “the leader in ICT” when it came to public sector service delivery and the development of the state’s technology sector as a whole.

The strategy does mention that the state is planning to create dedicated ‘service catalogue’ of corporate IT services which departments and agencies will be able to purchase from in a standardised way, and it also mandates the implementation of virtualisation technology in all government agencies, and the development of a trusted Government private cloud. However, it does not explicitly mention the kind of software as a service solutions which Transport for NSW and the Department of Trade and Investment had already gone to tender for.

opinion/analysis
To say that I am surprised to see these kinds of SaaS-style initiatives and open-minded thinking about offshore hosting coming from within the normally slow-moving and traditionally-minded NSW Government is an understatement. The new Coalition State Government has clearly already had a major impact on how the state is running its IT operations, and this is something to be praised.

There is no doubt that the SaaS initiatives within NSW will be very closely watched by the CIOs and line of business decision-makers of other jurisdictions. The NSW departments concerned have set themselves some pretty sharp timelines for their projects, and in particular I don’t believe the SaaS ERP platform can be delivered in the timeframe which has been set for it. However, if the projects go well, they will be viewed as visionary examples of SaaS solutions being implemented in state government, and probably replicated to a certain extent elsewhere.

Are we beginning to see the cracking of the locked down control attitude which Australia’s public sector has had towards offshore hosting? Well, it’s a little early to call. But it certainly is fascinating to see things being shaken up in this manner. It will be even more fascinating to re-examine the situation 12 months down the track.

The other thing which I think is fascinating about these SaaS deployments do not appear to be about cost. And, although this will also be a benefit if they are successful, they do not appear to be about agility. What these deployments appear to be about is avoiding the disastrous problems which state governments in Queensland and Victoria appear to be suffering when it comes to IT projects. Right now, as I have written many times, Australian state governments do not appear to be capable of successfully managing IT projects, maintaining their IT infrastructure, securing their systems or managing vendors.

What NSW’s SaaS efforts appear to be based on is realising this fact; the departments concerned appear to be recognising that IT is not their core capability and that they want external specialist organisations to take care of the whole kit and caboodle for them. The tendering initiatives detailed in this article go beyond managed services or traditional outsourcing. They represent attempts by government departments to simply hand off whole chunks of their IT platforms to outside vendors.

Now, everyone has their problems with vendors, and these departments will need to establish very strong governance controls over their eventual partners in these areas to make sure they don’t screw everything up. Vendors will be vendors, after all. But overall, given the ridiculously incompetent way in which most Australian state governments appear to be managing their IT platforms at the moment, I can’t help but see what NSW is doing right now as overwhelmingly positive.

Aussie non-profits adopt Office 365 en-masse

Renai LeMay — Fri, 11 May 2012 02:26:33 +0000

news Non-profit Australian organisations such as charities are adopting Microsoft’s Office 365 Software as a Service platform in large numbers, according to non-profit technology enablement group Infoxchange, which has recently helped 20 such organisations shift into Microsoft’s cloud.

In a statement co-released with Microsoft yesterday, Infoxchange said the shift to the cloud had enabled the not-for-profit (NFP) organisations to lower their IT costs, increase productivity and strengthen the communications they had with their partners, stakeholders and donors. The organisations have benefited from special charity pricing for Office 365, which Infoxchange has negotiated with Microsoft and its Australian partner Telstra.

David Spriggs, General Manager, Infoxchange said: “Many organisations in the public, private and charitable sectors have seen that cloud computing has opened new opportunities for them to better achieve their missions and accelerate their impact. We’ve seen NFPs dramatically improve their operations through cloud technology enabling them to do what they do best – positively impact people’s lives – but more effectively, efficiently and at less cost.”

Two such organisations to have shifted into the Microsoft cloud are Brainlink Services, a Victorian organisation which is devoted to helping residents affected by brain condictions, and Leisure Networks, another Victorian group devoted to working in partnership with the community sport and recreation sector to ensure access to recreation and physical activity for all residents.
“Office 365 has empowered our staff members to forget about technology and get on with their jobs,” said Vanessa Marrama, Communications Manager, BrainLink Services. “We don’t rely as much on our in-house IT support because the cloud has proven to be so reliable and user friendly.”

“Office 365 has enabled us to future proof our investment and provide a secure, easily accessible way to bring together our information and communication systems,” added Rob McHenry, Chief Executive Officer of Leisure Networks. “What is important to us is to have an easy to use system and central place for all the information we need when we are working from our main office, at home or somewhere around regional Victoria.”

Some of the key benefits which the NFP organisations are deriving from the shift to Office 365 included access to the platform from home or via mobile devices (with NFP staff often working away from their head office), reliability, manageability and cost aspects of Office 365 (most smaller NFPs do not have a dedicated IT team), the ability to access document management and collaboration tool Sharepoint, often for the first time, and access to data in emergency situations, such as during floods.

In addition, organisations are also benefiting from access to shared calendars and online meetings.

The news isn’t the first time Microsoft has been publicly known to be involved in Australia’s NFP/charity sector over the past year. In March, the company revealed it would give a $10 million grant to the Australian Red Cross to modernise its infrastructure. The group last upgraded its IT systems in 2002 and had been running on outdated infrastructure.

opinion/analysis
Of course, while the pair do have some altruistic motives, Microsoft and Telstra aren’t involved in this kind of initiative totally out of the goodness of their hearts. In Australia over the past several years, software as a service suites such as Office 365 have had their most success in deployments where organisations often need to provide IT infrastructure to people such as students who need to access such IT resources but may not need the kind of full-on desktop enterprise support which is so standard in large enterprises such as banks and government departments.

The non-profit sector is another example of this kind of deployment. These organisations typically need quite standardised IT infrastructure, they often have a lot of workers who commit part-time hours, work from home, change roles relatively frequently and so on. Because of this, and their lack of resources in general, productivity suites delivered online are going to be a very quick and easy solution for these groups to get access to decent IT infrastructure.

Along the way, Microsoft and Telstra get the chance to entrench a whole sector with their values and working habits; habits that often cross-over into the commercial or public sectors. This is the kind of deep seeding initiative which will ensure Microsoft’s dominance over Australian desktops for decades to come, and which will help drive acceptance of the SaaS model as a valid one in much larger organisations.

Optus takes TV Now case to High Court

Renai LeMay — Thu, 10 May 2012 02:53:44 +0000

news The nation’s second-largest telco Optus today said it would appeal its Federal Court loss over its TV Now cloud-based personal video recording software to the High Court.

“Today we can confirm we will appeal the TV Now decision in the High Court,” the telco’s chief executive Paul O’Sullivan said in a statement this afternoon. “We believe the TV Now case is extremely important in deciding the future for innovation, consumer choice and competition.”

“Increasingly, developments like cloud computing will see Australians using applications held online and wanting to store online rather than just using fixed hardware based in the home. Australian consumers want legitimate access to content on any device regardless of the genre and we want to continue making the latest technologies available to Australians to meet this demand.

“This is a very important public policy issue that needs to be determined by the highest court in the land, to give clarity to both consumers and the industry. As innovations like TV Now are readily available in other parts of the world, Australia must remain globally competitive and embrace the rapid convergence of technologies as we head towards an NBN world.”

Late in 2011, Justice Steven Rares of the Federal Court had found in Optus’ favour in the case which the telco had filed against the NRL (later joined by Telstra and the AFL), stating that Optus’ technology was similar to recording a TV show using a video recorder in a loungeroom. However, in a new judgement after an appeal, the full Federal Court found several weeks ago that Optus’ technology could not come under the auspices of the Copyright Act.

In its judgement, available online here, the Federal Court wrote that there were two issues at the heart of the case — who recorded the TV shows, and if Optus’ act in recording the device constituted an infringement of the copyright of the NRL, AFL or Telstra, could Optus invoke the “private and domestic use” defence under Section 111 of the Copyright Act, which allows limited recording of content for personal use.

The initial judgement had found that customers made the recording. “Ours is a different conclusion,” wrote the full Federal Court. “The maker was Optus or, in the alternative, it was Optus and the subscriber. It is unnecessary for present purposes to express a definitive view as between the two. Optus could be said to be the maker in that the service it offered to, and did, supply a subscriber was to make and to make available to that person a recording of the football match he or she selected.”

“Alternatively Optus and the subscriber could be said to be the maker for Copyright Act purposes as they acted in concert for the purpose of making a recording of the particular broadcast which the subscriber required to be made and of which he or she initiated the automated process by which copies were produced. In other words, they were jointly and severally responsible for the act of copying. That is our preferred view.”

Following on from this determination, the court found that Optus could not use the Section 111 defence under the Copyright Act.

The case has been viewed as a test of such services in Australia. However, the Federal Court warned against taking its implications too broadly. “We should emphasise that our concerns here have been limited to the particular service provider-subscriber relationship of Optus and its subscribers to the TV Now Service and to the nature and operation of the particular technology used to provide the service in question,” it wrote. “We accept that different relationships and differing technologies may well yield different conclusions to the “who makes the copy” question.”

Optus has reportedly suspended the TV Now app.

opinion/analysis
I think most people viewed this appeal as being fairly inevitable.

Image credit: Optus

Rackspace promises Aussie datacentre

Renai LeMay — Tue, 08 May 2012 07:51:45 +0000

blog If you talk to US-based companies about hosting providers, they’re likely to rabbit on and on about the unholy dominant duo of the US market: Amazon and Rackspace. Amazon. Rackspace. Rackspace. Amazon. It gets to be a bit repetitive at times. If you’re not with one, you’re with the other. Or both. And now both are (reportedly) expanding into Australia.

Like Amazon, Rackspace recently opened an Australian office and starting hiring local staff. Like Amazon, Rackspace has already notched up some Australian customers. And also like its eternal rival, Rackspace’s appeal to Australian customers has been somewhat limited by the fact that it doesn’t have any Australian infrastructure. But as iTNews reports today (we recommend you click here for the full article), all that may be about to change, as Rackspace follows Amazon in yet another way: Australian infrastructure. The publication quotes Rackspace chief operating officer Mark Roenigk:

Roenigk told iTnews this week that an Australian data centre was “a possibility in the next year”. “As you know, we have a sales office in Australia, and we will open a data centre in Australia in the next 12 to 18 months.”

Now Rackspace is a little more than a pure hosting company. I would say that, like a handful of companies in Australia such as Hostworks, the company doesn’t really specialise in the commodity web hosting hosting space but pushes up more towards the premium area; delivering managed service and cloud-computing type services, and even Software as a Service platforms such as Sharepoint.

If it does invest in its own datacentre infrastructure in Australia (probably becoming a tenant in a facility such as that offered by Global Switch rather than deploying its own physical facility, it could become a strong local player; bringing a maturity to the hosting and cloud infrastructure market which is still somewhat lacking locally, with most rival companies in the space still gradually working out the technology back-end to make this kind of service scalable.

Of course, we’ve heard various promises and speculative hints about Australian datacentres from a number of global companies over the past few years. There was Amazon.com. There was Salesforce.com. There was Netsuite. And even Telstra has expressed its desire to host Microsoft cloud infrastructure on shore. None of this has eventuated so far; it will be interesting to see whether Rackspace can be the global cloud provider to break the trend. We await the outcome with bated breath.

Image credit: Whrelf Siemens, royalty free

Pacific swaps out VMware for Hyper-V

Renai LeMay — Wed, 02 May 2012 07:15:53 +0000

news Clothing and homewares manufacturer Pacific Brands has revealed it switched out VMware’s market-dominating virtualisation platform over the past several years, installing Microsoft’s rival Hyper-V system instead as it sought to take more advantage of virtualisation in its operations.

According to the company’s technical services lead Brent England, the company’s virtualisation journey started in 2007. Pacific was initially using VMware’s ESX 3 platform to virtualise its central server infrastructure, which it eventually upgraded to version 3.5. The company kept on using the software for the next several years, but by the time 2010 rolled around, the situation had started getting a little uncomfortable. England says by that time, Pacific was experiencing a number of performance issues which were causing some of its staff running its business applications to complain.

Looking back, the executive says that a number of the problems were related to technical constraints inherent to VMware’s platform of the day. Pacific was using HP’s Enterprise Virtual Arrays platform for storage on the back end, but VMware’s software was having hiccups with respect to the multi-path drivers which Pacific needed to get the right performance from its storage system. At the time, England said, VMware’s support team was telling Pacific that the issues would be resolved with native drivers coming through the pipeline in the next version (4) of ESX, compared with the generic drivers available in version 3 of the platform.

“We had 24 hosts at one stage in ESX, and 20 LUNs … dual paths,” says England, referring to the logical unit number used to identify a logical unit for storage purposes. “There were closing in on 160 paths that were causing performance issues. 15 LUNs were all presented down the one I/O channel. A lot of the issues were in that we had to go in and set the path that we had.”

This situation might have been resolved by the new version of VMware. But other factors also complicated Pacific’s situation. Because the organisation operates on an outsourced IT basis with its service provider HP, the licensing situation around its use of VMware’s products was a little complex. The company’s previous VMware licences had been OEM licences, so the organisation wasn’t covered for the new version 4 of VMware’s platform.

At the time, as is fairly standard when it comes to enterprise deployments of software, HP didn’t want to immediately migrate to the new version of VMware’s platform when it was released, preferring to wait until VMware released version 4.1. But version 4.1, when it was released, would also have different hardware requirements from previous versions.

Because of these issues, Pacific looked around for alternatives, and found an obvious one in Microsoft’s Hyper-V platform, which has picked up some early wins in Australia.

While Hyper-V is known to have a more limited featureset compared to VMware’s platform, Pacific eventually came to the conclusion that there were certain aspects of version 4 of VMware ESX that the company would like to have, but which weren’t strictly necessary. This realisation, combined with the fact that Microsoft had recently unlocked a critical Hyper-V feature in the Service Pack 1 upgrade for Windows Server 2008 R2, tipped the company down the Microsoft path.

England notes that the company’s customer relationship management software, based on Microsoft Dynamics CRM, had between three hundred and four hundred users, and with prior versions of Hyper-V, the company wouldn’t have been able to allocate the 16GB of memory the software required. But the new version solved these and other issues.

One of the positive aspects of the switch is that the company’s outsourcer, HP, was able to support the new Hyper-V environment pretty easily. “We Hyper-V we didn’t have to get any training done,” says England, noting that most of the required toolsets were already supported by HP, and that the company now had three to four staff managing the environment who hadn’t required extra training.

There were “a few hiccups” along the way during the migration, but those were sorted out pretty quickly. Now, Pacific’s running between 18 and 24 host servers, supporting about 140 virtual machines. And it’s planning to cut that number down further to about 10 hosts supporting about 200 virtual machines.

“Since we started this [project] we’ve deployed a lot of applications,” noted England, pointing out that Pacific has new JD Edwards and Hyperion financials installs, a new CRM system, a new SharePoint install and a new retail point of sale system. In addition, it has also shifted off IBM’s Lotus Notes system and onto Microsoft’s Outlook/Exchange platform. Prior to the Hyper-V project, it had about 60 virtual machines.

The rollout has also had a positive impact on the relationships which England and his colleagues have with the rest of the business. Previously, the executive notes, he used to be regularly “called into a room” to talk about unvirtualising applications to help them perform better. Now there’s much more widespread satisfaction about the performance of the company’s applications.

Broadly, what Pacific Brands has implemented for its applications could be described as advanced virtualisation or even potentially ‘private cloud’, under a managed services agreement with HP. England says the company has looked at extending the company’s platform out to more ‘public cloud’-type scenarios, but hasn’t really dipped its toe in the water yet.

“We have looked multiple times at moving some of our email to Office 365,” he says, referring to Microsoft’s hosted email service. However, he notes the company is still committed to HP for some of the related infrastructure. HP seems keen to get Pacific into the giant new datacentre it’s building in Sydney, which would also be an option. And in a broader Microsoft sense, England says Pacific was also interested in looking at public cloud infrastructure such as Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform. “I think we need to understand how we can take some of our applications there,” he says.

However, as a KPMG report released yesterday found about Australian views on the subject more broadly, England isn’t convinced “the tools are there yet” for cloud in total. For example, he mentions that Telstra wanted to build a private cloud infrastructure for Pacific, but said the telco was interested in providing a virtualisation layer, whereas what Pacific really wanted was to have its current virtualisation environment connected to another offering, so it could take advantage of another organisation’s vaster compute resources when it needed to.

For more on Pacific’s migration, see this story on ZDNet.com.au, or a similar story on iTNews.

opinion/analysis
Battles between competing platforms have a long history in the global technology sector. Windows versus Linux versus Apple. SAP versus Oracle. Salesforce.com versus Oracle. Microsoft versus Google versus IBM. And so on. For the longest time, VMware looks to have been on top of the still-young market for enterprise-grade virtualisation software globally. I would conservatively estimate that something close to … 100 percent of large Australian organisations are using the company’s software in one form or another.

But over the past several years, we’ve seen a number of major Australian organisations implement Hyper-V ahead of VMware. IND Direct, Coles, the NSW Department of Education and so on; the list keeps on growing, and now Microsoft can add a notch labelled ‘Pacific Brands’ to its belt.

I like this. I like this a great deal. Because, as much as VMware has done a fantastic job of making amazing products in this space, literally creating a whole new category of software in just a few years and revolutionising enterprise IT globally, it never hurts to have a little competition. In recent years the company had gotten a little big for its boots, with one local IT manager describing some of the terms around vSphere 5, for example, as gouging customers “beyond all semblance of what’s reasonable”.

This is the language typically applied to monopolists. What we see emerging now with Hyper-V in the global virtualisation market is a challenge to that monopoly. And I’m sure customers will benefit strongly from that development. And I’m equally sure VMware can afford to take a few knocks ;)