news Former US whole of government chief information officer Vivek Kundra will hit Australia over the next several weeks for a speaking tour that will include events for his new employer Salesforce.com, as well as the Australian Information Industry Association.

Kundra has a long history working within government organisations at various levels in the US. He served as the director of infrastructure technologies at Arlington Country in Virginia in the early years of this decade, for example, before later becoming the state’s assistant secretary of commerce and technology. After that time he became the chief information officer of the District of Columbia. He had also spent time as the vice president of software firm Evincible.

When US President Barack Obama won the 2008 US election, Kundra was appointed to be the president-elect’s technology advisor. He was then named to the post of Federal chief information officer in March 2009, several months after Obama himself took office.

Kundra’s time in the US Government saw him preside over a number of major changes which have caused wider global ripples within the public sectors of countries such as Canada, the UK and Australia. Kundra, for example, was responsible for creating a whole of government IT dashboard through which government staff could easily gain a birds’ eye view of all major projects and IT expenditure across all departments. Part of the project was that each project had a picture of the accountable executive attached to it — usually a departmental chief information officer. The technology behind the dashboard is publicly available so that other jurisdictions can adopt it.

Another initiative undertaken by the US Government under Kundra was an initiative he dubbed “TechStat”. The TechStat toolkit was also made publicly available alongside the IT Dashboard. As detailed in a very useful article on the subject published by InformationWeek, TechStat sessions see an agency’s CIO and CFO, central government analysts and officials from related departments brought together with staff from the central whole of government office of the CIO to rapidly examine and evaluate the status and future prospects of a major IT project. In many cases, after reviewing a project’s current status and likely future, the government decision-makers simply cancelled the projects or rolled them into other similar iniatives in different departments.

Kundra was also responsible for pioneering a ‘cloud first’ strategy in the US Government which saw agencies required to evaluate cloud computing options prior to making any new investments in IT.
However, Kundra’s tenure within the US administration did not last long, with the executive leaving the government just two years after he joined it, in August 2011. He then joined Harvard University as a visiting fellow, before being announced as executive vice president of emerging markets for cloud computing vendors Salesforce.com in January this year.

Kundra’s time was not without controversies. A survey of IT professionals in government by online IT community MeriTalk published in September heavily criticised the executive. “Vivek’s tenure … was like a bottle of champagne — seems like a great idea, exciting start, but the plan’s unclear, and the next morning you wake up with the same problems and a sore head,” said Steve O’Keeffe, founder, MeriTalk, at the time.

In Australia, Kundra will speak at a press event in Sydney being held by Salesforce.com on Monday 13th February, and at the AIIA’s Cloud Summit in Canberra the following Wednesday.

Kundra’s tour of Australia has already attracted a degree of controversy, however.

The AIIA notified its members of Kundra’s attendance at its cloud summit in early December, noting that the executive would “lead a US/Australian dialogue on cloud computing”. It added at the time: “The dialogue will address how to eliminate obstacles to trans-border flows of data or information, while maintaining data security and privacy as well as law enforcement and national security. The two governments will explore the possibility of future dialogues on other digital topics of mutual concern.”

However, it is believed that the AIIA was not aware at the time that Kundra would be in January appointed a senior executive at Salesforce.com. It is unclear to what extent Kundra will be speaking at the event as a Salesforce.com executive, and to what extent he will be speaking as a former US Government chief information officer.

opinion/analysis
I was invited to attend Kundra’s press event in Sydney being held by Salesforce.com. However, I have declined to attend. In addition, I will not be reporting on anything that Kundra says at the AIIA’s event in Canberra, or on any other events that the executive speaks at in Australia. In short, I have decided that Delimiter will be boycotting coverage of Kundra’s attendance in Australia.

The reason is that I am personally highly disappointed in Kundra’s somewhat cynical early departure from the US Government and into the welcoming arms of leading cloud computing vendor Salesforce.com.

Kundra had a once in a lifetime chance, with his ascension to the CIO role in the new Obama administration, to make a great deal of systemic change in the US Government’s use of technology. And he brought a huge degree of effort, energy and innovative thinking to that initiative in the two short years he was in the post — creating several landmark programs which continue to have an impact on public sector technology thinking globally.

But then Kundra instantly undercut all of that good work by not following through on his efforts. After just two short years — which is a miniscule amount of time for the slow-moving public sector — the executive abandoned the US Government to its own devices and switched sides to work for a cloud computing vendor.

Kundra had a direct connection to the administration in the form of US President Obama. By leaving the Government, he left IT executives across the US public sector without that sort of high-level sponsorship for their initiatives. And by joining Salesforce.com, he has invalidated his government ‘Cloud First’ cloud computing push. Many within the US Government will be wondering to what extent Kundra was thinking of his future career when he made that push.

We’ve seen similar examples of top-level government IT executives joining vendors, with the most notable example being former Queensland Government chief information officer Peter Grant, who left his role in 2008 to become the State Director of Microsoft, a role he held for just over a year. In December Grant was reappointed to Queensland Government CIO role. However, Grant stuck around in the Qld Govt CIO role for longer (three years, compared with two) than Kundra did in the US Govt role, and he was obviously overseeing less dramatic change than Kundra was in the US, whose Federal public sector is an order of magnitude larger than anything we see in Australia.

My opinion is that Kundra should have stuck it out in the US for at least the first term of the Obama administration, and a second term if Obama won it. That way he could have driven real change in the US Government which would have affected generations of residents. Six years in government is about enough time to get some decent stuff done. Anything less is probably not enough.

In Australia, we do have some examples of public servants who have gone beyond the call of duty in serving the cause of technology in government. One of those is Department of Defence chief information officer Greg Farr, who helped completely reform the Australian Taxation Office’s IT operations and is now doing the same at Defence. Farr’s history within Australia’s government dates back a long time and recently earned him a Public Service Medal in the Australia Day honours.

Now that’s public service worth listening to.

Image credit: US Government

news Accounting software firm Xero announced last week that it had raised a further AU$15.5 million from current strategic investors to maintain its future growth in Australia and worldwide. The New Zealand-based company also announced the acquisition of Max Solutions, a leading practice management company and developer of WorkflowMax, a job, time and invoice management solution.

Chris Ridd, Managing Director, Xero Australia said that both the new developments supported Xero’s rapid growth here in Australia and the rest of the world. “We continue to transform the accounting industry by helping them embrace the cloud. Many of our customers are WorkflowMax customers so this together with Paycycle gives us a very powerful combination,” Ridd stated. WorkflowMax was introduced in the market in early 2008.

Xero will use the capital raised to expand business in the Australian, USA and UK markets, where the company is gaining market share against the large incumbent providers. The company, founded by serial New Zealand entrepreneur Rod Drury and small business accountant Hamish Edwards, has 170 staff spread across four countries, with the most recent office set up in the US. Xero’s online accounting software spares its clients the hassle of installing anything on their computers.

Among the strategic investors who have given additional funds for Xero’s global growth are independent Xero director and board member of Fairfax Media, Sam Morgan as well as the former co-founder of MYOB, Craig Winkler. Valar Ventures, the New Zealand investment vehicle of US-based Peter Thiel and one of the initial investors in Facebook, is another investor. Thiel incidentally is a former co-founder of PayPal, who had invested NZ$4 million in Xero and joined its advisory board in October 2010.

The Max Solutions acquisition, worth AU$4.6 million, will enable Xero to provide a full complement of online tools to accountants wanting to manage a ‘modern practice’ without using expensive in-house servers.

Max Solutions was founded in 2007 by Gavin George and Chris Spence, who are slated to join the Xero team and bring in all the other staff of Max Solutions. George spoke about the significant opportunities the acquisition would give both the WorkflowMax team and product set. “We always envisaged that WorkflowMax would be a truly global solution, and now with the funding, talent and energy that Xero brings we have a significant opportunity to achieve our goal,” he said.

The Xero Board also revealed the launch of the Shareholder Purchase Plan (SPP). The SPP will allow current New Zealand-based shareholders to acquire new Xero shares under the same terms as strategic investors. The company presently has 60,000 paying customers in over 100 countries, and has also built up strategic marketing partnerships with Telstra and ANZ.

With the newly raised funds and acquisition, Xero seems to be rapidly progressing as a leader in the online accounting market. Revenue in Australia increased to $1.4 million for the half-year up to 30 September, 2011, making it the group’s fastest growing region. Compared to the same period in 2010, this indicates a whopping 260 per cent increase. Consequently, Xero has big expectations for its global operating revenue for the year ending 31 March, 2012 to be twice its 2011 revenue of AU$7.2 million.

Image credit: Svilen Milev (SXC.hu), royalty free

news IBM XIV Storage System Gen3 will be a key infrastructure component for Bendigo and Adelaide Bank, forming an underlying foundation for the ongoing development and delivery of customer-focused business applications, according to an announcement by IBM yesterday.

Bendigo and Adelaide Bank, which owns and operates Bendigo Bank, Adelaide Bank, Sandhurst Trustees, Leveraged Equities, Bendigo Wealth, Rural Bank and Oxford Funding among others, is the first Australian organisation that will deploy the recently announced XIV Gen3 disk storage systems.

IBM claims that IBM XIV is a proven high-end disk storage system designed to eliminate storage management complexity and deliver high performance. The company asserts that the Gen3 models are optimised for cloud computing and virtualisation, and will provide the bank with ample room for service expansion in the near future without the economic and environmental costs of extra hardware.

The two XIV Gen3 units to be deployed will be part of a set of upgrades, which includes new IBM SAN Volumes Controller nodes, to improve capacity for Bendigo and Adelaide Bank’s customer service operations. The storage systems will support file/print applications, Exchange, SQL databases and backup and recovery applications. The upgrades are also expected to address the issue of steady increase in IO load and storage server CPU utilisation with deployment of new customer applications.

“The new IBM XIV Gen3 units will provide us with the capacity to deliver and maintain significant performance improvements as our storage utilisation grows, without storage issues. We expect to see considerable benefits, including improved and consistent application response times,” said Greg Smith, Storage Team Leader at Bendigo and Adelaide Bank. “Our objective is to be the number one customer-connected bank in Australia. The main thrust of application development has been around knowing and understanding customers better, and delivering applications which provide better services to them.”

He added, “We’re able to consolidate our storage requirements into a smaller number of controllers on the floor. The IBM XIV Gen3s will ensure performance improvements in our applications, allowing us to provision storage quickly so that the bank can continue to grow, within its current data centre footprint.”

All praise for the “seamless installation process” which would allow them to “leverage the new infrastructure well before the peak Christmas period,” Smith gave credit for this to the ongoing relationship between Bendigo and Adelaide Bank, IBM and ISI. ISI, an IBM business partner, is an Australia owned and operated IT solutions provider that is working on the implementation.

Image credit: Patrick H, Creative Commons

news IBM announced yesterday that it is developing a global private cloud computing system for the 2012 Australian Open as part of its technology partnership for the international Grand Slam tennis tournament.

IBM has long provided managed services, including consulting services and hardware and software solutions for building clouds for Australian customers, but has not been forthcoming about its cloud computing strategy to the Australian market until now.

According to a statement by IBM, the IBM private cloud is a virtualised environment hosted in three data centres based in the US. The private cloud enables continuous access to content, including a raised level of match and player data, from the Australian Open for millions of global fans, broadcasters and players.

The Australian Open organisers, Tennis Australia, can use the private cloud to rapidly scale its data in real time and ensure uninterrupted availability even in the event of a total data centre outage. IBM has virtualised a good deal of the event’s data infrastructure and server migration providing higher flexibility in technology solutions, which can scale up or down according to the fans’ changing demands.

In IBM’s statement, Samir Mahir, CIO of Tennis Australia, stressed that all tennis fans are important to the organisers, whether they attend the event or are watching from their homes. “We want to give a connected experience for the Australian Open. The private cloud solution provides the necessary volume of Australian Open data to anyone in the world at any time, without any excess demand affecting its quality or availability. This means fans can expect real-time access to more dynamic content even during the busiest periods of the competition” explained Mahir.

IBM has previously leveraged the private cloud at other Grand Slam tournaments to satisfy the data integrity and scalability needs of the USA, France and UK organisers. Mahir spoke about the high need for elasticity of computing power when dealing with audiences of a major tournament: “For most of the year Tennis Australia is a small and medium size business, but for two weeks every January we host the Australian Open and become a large global enterprise. We need to be able to rapidly adjust to the number of fans accessing our digital content and their changing interests throughout the competition.”

The Australian Open website, which was launched in 1996, has had a whopping 10 million unique visitors, with a 45% increase in the number of users and a 43% increase in page views since 2008. The cost per user has dropped by 35% and the cost per page view has also come down by 34% since 2008.

Mahir said that IBM’s private cloud allows the tournament organisers to manage peaks and troughs throughout the design, testing and live phases of the Australian Open with cost-effectiveness and flexibility. At this year’s event, Tennis Australia will be able to provision a new web server in under three minutes and transfer a live application workload from one IBM power System to another in under four minutes.

This year, the Australian Open will feature an enhanced IBM SlamTracker, a live scoring and analysis tool introduced in 2008, delivering match statistics across all courts, live text commentary and a momentum visualiser for featured matches. SlamTracker uses IBM business analytics technology to examine more than 39 million data points from seven years of Grand Slam tournaments, analysing for styles and patterns of winning players. The analysis is compared to the opponents’ style and patterns to establish the keys to the match for each player. A total of 256 singles matches will be played on seven broadcast courts and analysed.More than 35km of cables have been laid throughout the stadium.

IBM also plans to add an Android smartphone application to its existing iPhone app for the Australian Open, delivering live scores, highlights and news to additional mobile users. The private cloud will enable a direct interface with all of IBM’s front-end services.

The project lead for IBM’s Australian Open, Sarah Cole, said that 2012 is the nineteenth year of IBM’s role as Official Technology Partner of the Australian Open. She claimed that IBM’s investment in novel technologies has transformed Grand Slam tennis into one of the most sophisticated spectator sports in the world. “One of the hallmarks of the partnership with Tennis Australia has been the successful adoption of technology innovation to enrich the Australian Open experience for players, fans and organisers,” Cole said.

Image credit: Patrick H, Creative Commons

news Appichar, a technology company that has been working with not-for-profit organisations for over ten years in the UK and three years in Australia, has launched a locally developed system called ‘Supporter360’ that aims to use the latest cloud technologies to help charitable organisations computerise their operations with minimal capital investment.

Traditionally organisations are forced to invest heavily in hardware and software making it difficult for small organisations and charitable organisations to afford the luxury of technology. However, Appichar’s founder and CEO, Ian Ryder said that due to the sea change in the accessibility of technology for everybody, the opportunities to connect and innovate have greatly increased. New technologies and the new cloud approach helps in the creation of an evolving system rather than locking you into a framework that does not change but forces you to work with it.

“This positive approach fundamentally changes the end-user experience and what organisations can expect from their precious investments and we’re really excited to be part of that change,” said Ryder. This breaking of entry barriers is especially crucial for charitable organisations, as they would like to ensure that each donor’s contribution is utilised to the maximum. With no money spent on servers, software, training and support staff, cloud has the potential to become the relevant technology for charitable organisations.

The system is built on top of Salesforce.com’s platform and was developed in Australia over the past 18 months. Appichar is now making the platform available globally.

“Disruptive technologies are generally great for everyone apart from the old-fashioned companies who would really rather cling onto the old way of doing things,” said Ryder, noting that large successful billion dollar companies will resist adopting new technologies like cloud computing in order to maintain their revenue flow.

But companies like Appichar are making it necessary for those organisations to change in order to compete with smaller more nimble firms, he added. “It’s happening to much bigger companies in the mobile world and you can even look at Microsoft and wonder what the future holds for them. It doesn’t get much bigger than that!” said Ryder.

Ryder said that his company is very excited about the product and that they have pulled together some of the smartest minds in the not-for-profit and fundraising world. They also have a great relationship with the Salesforce Foundation that makes this product freely available for not-for-profit organisations.

opinion/analysis
There’s a fair amount of cloud hype contained in this article; but it’s a very slow news week so you have got to expect a few puff pieces ;) Setting that aside, however, it is interesting to see these kind of more specialised applications built on top of the Salesforce.com platform, especially when it’s done in Australia. I don’t think the potential of the platform has yet been fully explored, and I’m sure that a number of quite powerful niche products will continue to emerge in this vein over the next few years — especially in areas such as government, where good specialised cloud solutions are desperately needed.

Image credit: Ewen Roberts, Creative Commons. Opinion/analysis by Renai LeMay

news The Australian Government’s IT industry advisory body has stated in a report that the nation has the scope to become a global leader in cloud computing technology and drive innovation and productivity.

Releasing the report by the Information Technology Industry Innovation Council (ITIIC) this week, Innovation Minister Senator Kim Carr said that it emphasised Australia’s strengths in the IT arena. “Australia has an opportunity here, to develop a strong local capability in cloud computing. We are a safe, secure destination for hosting cloud data applications, and offer political stability, and a stable and transparent regulatory environment,” said Carr.

Cloud computing has been expanding in Australia and currently, according to the report, more than 71 percent of companies use a cloud-based service – an almost one-third increase over the past two years. “Innovative Australian IT firms with leading-edge cloud technologies can cash in on the projected rapid growth in the global market for cloud products and services, with an estimated global value of over US$55 billion in 2014,” Carr said.

The report further suggested that not all firms are geared to handle the cloud revolution and need to adapt to the new technology. “Those providing software solutions and services will need to adapt to cloud-based infrastructure and those providing on-premise services and infrastructure will need to enhance their offerings to become part of a cloud provider marketplace,” suggested Carr.

Adopting cloud computing as an IT strategy has multiple benefits such as improved operational efficiencies, increased market penetration, reduced costs, better hedging in IT investments, and quicker adaptability to fluctuating market conditions.

The report said that Australian-based cloud services might also have an edge vis-à-vis critical issues like data security, risk management, privacy, sovereignty and service quality. Carr said that the newly formed Global Access Partners (GAP) National Standing Committee on Cloud Computing – which comprises Federal and State government agencies, the research community, industry leaders and advocacy groups – would further discuss the issues raised by the ITIIC.

In January this year, a worldwide survey by Gartner of more than 2,000 CIOs identified cloud computing as a top priority for many organizations. In this survey, cloud computing and virtualisation were recognized as the top two technologies most desired by CIOs for cost effective and efficient operations.
CIOs expect to adopt cloud services much faster than originally anticipated, with 43% projected to have the major part of their IT running in the cloud over the next four years. This dovetails well with Australia’s plans in this arena.

A number of small firms promoting cloud computing have sprung up in Australia over the past several years, with Sydney-based companies OrionVM and Ninefold being examples. In addition, a number of larger companies with strong Australian presences — such as as Telstra, Optus, Fujitsu, CSC and more — have invested heavily in building Australian cloud computing infrastructure.

opinion/analysis
I’m surprised by this report. If there was any area which I thought Australia would be relatively poorly positioned to play globally in, I would have thought it to be cloud computing. The reason for this is that the cost of building and operating datacentres in Australia, as well as data transit costs to the rest of the world, is simply quite a bit higher than it is in other countries. With a limited local market to boot, these are the reasons why Australia’s cloud computing market has been relatively slow to take off.

On the other hand, Australia does have a number of data links to Asia, and our solid regulatory structure and stable government and commercial sector might lead to us being seen as a strong regional hub for cloud computing solutions which could be provided to the wider Asia-Pacific region. I could certainly see that happening. And we have one of the highest rates of corporate virtualisation in the world, so there is clearly strong potential for that to be leveraged into wider expertise in advanced datacentre modernisation and Infrastructure as a Service.

So is this report just jumping on the cloud computing bandwagon, flagging a hyped area to the Government as being worthy of investment? It’s hard to tell at this point. At this stage I would see it as a mix of optimism and pragmatism. Just what the Government does with it is another matter ;)

Image credit: Mackenzie and John, Creative Commons. Opinion/analysis by Renai LeMay.

news In an announcement yesterday, HP revealed that diversified local company Elders had signed it for a seven-year infrastructure and applications services agreement. Elders is a 172-year-old company incorporating the Elders rural services businesses and the automotive and forestry operations acquired and developed by Futuris Corporation.

According to the agreement, Elders will utilise cloud technology to deploy its enterprise technology refresh program – Project Connect. HP Enterprise Cloud Services will provide Elders with secure processing capacity and real-time data access that will enable the company to respond quickly to the changing business conditions intrinsic to agribusiness. This will help Elders to drive innovation by getting new services and products faster to the market, avoiding the typical protracted capital acquisition and systems deployment processes.

Shaun Hughes, Chief Information Officer, Elders Australia stated that outsourcing to HP was an integral part of the company’s transformation program. “HP’s cloud will provide us with a robust infrastructure and service delivery model that enables us to scale up for each of our program releases, and the applications methodologies and tools HP brings to the table enable us to de-risk the legacy development components of our build,” Hughes said.

In October, HP had announced new solutions and services based on HP Converged Infrastructure that would help businesses and service providers to efficiently deliver cloud services and to minimise risk, lower costs and leverage existing investments.

As part of a phased four-year program, Elders can utilise a combination of existing technology along with automated processes and procedures for application and infrastructure management and security. HP will also offer its full range of Technology Outsourcing services to modernise and refresh the technology environment. HP Data Centre Services, according to the vendor, will help to guarantee high accessibility to IT services and uninterrupted reliable operations. HP also will deliver Network Management Services to remotely manage and monitor Elders’ 540 distributed networks across Australia.

Additionally, HP will provide a set of Security Services, offering comprehensive security oversight of the managed environment in accordance with Elders’ security standards and policies. To plan for a cloud environment, HP will use HP Storage, ESL E-series Tape Libraries and HP BladeSystem servers to refresh Elders’ hardware.

HP will synchronise Elders’ technology infrastructure with the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) Version 3 service management framework using products from its HP Software suite.

HP will also supply Workplace Services for all of Elders’ computing devices, including printers, handheld devices and desktop and notebook PCs. All of these infrastructure and applications services will be provided from HP global delivery centres in Australia and the Philippines, minimising risk for clients like Elders while offering them greater flexibility and cost efficiency.

Image credit: Timo Balk, royalty free

news National broadband provider iiNet announced this week that its newest business product Business Cloud would enable small and medium businesses (SMBs) to develop privately hosted IT infrastructure. Business Cloud aims to spare customers the bother and expense of setting up and maintaining their own IT installations.

iiNet Business Cloud has been established in partnership with leading vendors such as IBM, Juniper and VMware. Businesses can utilise the platform to build and deploy their entire infrastructure in the cloud for a fee starting from $29 a month.

Greg Bader, CEO of iiNet Business said that virtualised computing was often perceived as ‘too hard’ by SMBs, despite it being used by large businesses for many years. “Business Cloud follows from our launch of Business Voice. Put simply, it gives the small guys the same tools of the trade normally reserved for the big enterprise players. Removing barriers to entry and offering total flexibility, these products reflect the needs of operating a small business in today’s challenging environment,” said Bader in a statement.

Bader said that Business Cloud would help companies shift their focus from continuous maintenance and regular upgrades to managing their business. He added that customers felt it important to store their business data in Australian datacentres to ease concerns about data sovereignty and management.

Vice President and Managing Director of VMware Australia and New Zealand, Duncan Bennet spoke about partnering with iiNet: “Powered by our leading cloud computing technology, iiNet customers will utilise Business Cloud to increase IT agility through increased consolidation, task automation and simplified management.”

Features of iiNet Business Cloud include:

• Directly accessing the Business Cloud catalogue and virtual data centres through a user-friendly self-service web portal enables customers to use an operating system of their choice, clone or create virtual machines, and remotely access consoles.
• Business Cloud’s catalogues, virtual appliances, templates and thousands of virtual applications (vApps) can be swiftly accessed and deployed on preconfigured media or machines.
• A variety of enterprise class security features provides a secure virtual environment for businesses to fence their vApps.
• Customers will have access to Business Cloud’s Application Programming Interface.
• Data will be hosted in data centres based in Australia with support from iiNet’s local technical support team.

opinion/analysis
It’s good that iiNet is getting into the cloud computing market; it’s yet another example of the sort of value-added service which Australia’s major ISPs will need to focus on to maintain growth levels. In addition, iiNet, like Telstra and Optus, has an advantage over other cloud computing players; integrating its network infrastructure with its cloud infrastructure should drive performance gains for customers.

However, I remain somewhat cynical about the whole exercise. Bader’s not a chief executive type; for a long time he’s been iiNet’s chief technology officer, and I see a CEO role as primarily a sales role in this context. Similarly, iiNet’s not a company which has typically focused on selling services to businesses in the past; it’s primarily marketed its services at consumers.

In addition, I don’t believe the small to medium business market is really interested in the type of cloud computing which iiNet is offering here; or at least not yet. SMBs aren’t interested in this type of Infrastructure as a Service offering. What they are actually primarily after is Software as a Service: Platforms like NetSuite, Salesforce.com, Google Apps and so on that take care of all the details for them for one flat monthly charge. They rarely want to administer too much themselves. It’s primarily large enterprises at this point who are interested in the sort of IaaS product which iiNet is selling here; and there are probably better options than iiNet out there for IaaS services for this kind of larger organisation. Can iiNet do IaaS better than Fujitsu or CSC? Doubtful.

Having said all that, I think in the medium to long term, SMBs might be interested in this kind of offer; especially as the NBN rolls out. if iiNet can hang on until that point and develop its offering, it may well be well-positioned for the cloud opportunity.

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

news Village Roadshow, the Melbourne-based company that has been entertaining Australians since 1954 with theme parks, resorts and attractions, cinemas, music and DVD distribution, has moved its data storage to the cloud. The Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) data centre model for Village Roadshow was built on NetApp hardware and provided by service provider Interactive to manage Village Roadshow’s substantial data growth.

Previously, Village Roadshow managed its own datacentre, located at its Jam Factory headquarters in Melbourne. However, incessantly increasing data demands obliged the company to look for alternative, more efficient IT solutions.

CIO of Village Roadshow, David Kindlen stated that the company had been running out of space to store its data. “We needed a high performance and scalable managed production storage solution that provided strong business continuity capabilities at a competitive price to an in-house purchase,” said Kindlen.

Director of sales at Interactive, Simon Durkin, explained that the company’s Tier III data centre in Melbourne is intended to house data specifically for customers dealing with considerable data growth.

“Village Roadshow already had existing NetApp hardware installed onsite, so the customer was happy with our recommendations to move its data to our NetApp-based environment.” The NetApp FAS3170 storage system stores all of Village Roadshow’s data. Village Roadshow’s storage in the IaaS model is wholly flexible and capable of keeping up with the ongoing data growth.

Speaking about the increased demand for cloud services from customers, Durkin said: “We expect this growth to continue as more businesses seek the financial and business benefits of the cloud, combined with the security of our Tier III data centre. Interactive has made it a priority to provide world-class cloud solutions by investing in the best local talent and building our business on the technologies of trusted partners including NetApp. We are proud to be able to work with NetApp to build on the folio of services we already provide Village Roadshow.”

Vice President and Managing Director, NetApp ANZ, Peter O’Connor highlighted Interactive’s model for Village Roadshow as a terrific example of how massive amounts of data can be moved easily to the cloud without the bother of losing data or enduring downtime. “Not only is Village Roadshow benefiting from the fact that it now doesn’t have the overhead of storing its ever-growing data onsite, but it gains greater efficiency and agility benefits that can be reverberated throughout its entire business,” O’Connor said.

opinion/analysis
While Village Roadshow hasn’t provided much detail here about what it’s actually using IaaS for, or what levels of data is being stored with Interactive, it’s still good to see some more customer examples in the cloud computing area. They are a bit thin on the ground in Australia at the moment. If anyone knows of further examples of Australian organisations adopting any of the particular variants of cloud computing (SaaS, IaaS, PaaS and so on), please don’t hesitate to get in contact with us about them.

If you want to tip us off privately about major projects, there’s also our anonymous tips form.

Opinion/analysis by Renai LeMay

blog Excellent blog post here from Altium chief information officer Alan Perkins, who gives his top seven tips for the most important things to consider when moving enterprise IT services into the cloud. Ranging from data portability to API options, risk mitigation strategies and beyond, this post represents a comprehensive mental headcheck for those considering the cloud. One of our favourite paragraphs:

“When I first started looking at Cloud concepts about six years ago I was looking with the eyes of a sceptic and I was asking the question “What can’t I do if I adopt this approach?” By taking this kind of view I found there were plenty of things I didn’t think I could do, and this thinking led me to see restrictions and obstacles. Once I started to ask myself rather contrary question “What can I do if I adopt this approach?”, I started to see all sorts of opportunities emerge.”

One of the things I most like about Perkins’ post is how sober it is. The executive is often cited as one of Australia’s chief end user proponents for the cloud. But the tone in his blog post is conservative and geared towards business requirements. This, and Perkins’ solid turn of phrase, make it a good read.

Image credit: Karina Faiani, Royalty Free