news Nokia has reportedly revealed that its first smartphones to feature the Windows Phone 7 operating system, the Lumia 800 and 710, will hit Australia in March, with the 800 to launch through all major local carriers.

The Lumia 800 is similar in design to Nokia’s N9 handset launched in Australia last year. However, while the N9 ran the now-obsolete Meego operating system, the Lumia 800 will run Microsoft’s new Windows Phone 7 operating system, which Nokia is standardising on, following a management shake-up in late 2010 which resulted in former Microsoft executive Stephen Elop taking the help at the Finnish firm.

The Financial Review’s technology section quoted Nokia Australia managing director Chris Carr today (we recommend you click here for the full article) as saying that the Lumia 800 and its sister phone, the Lumia 710 would go on sale in Australia in March, with the 800 to sell through major carriers Telstra, Optus and Vodafone.

Australia has not seen a major launch of a new smartphone running Windows Phone 7 since late 2010, when Microsoft and its smartphone hardware partners HTC, Samsung and LG worked closely with Telstra to bring a swathe of models running the operating system to market. Over the past six months, a number of local Windows Phone 7 enthusiasts have started to question the major telcos as to when new launches would occur.

The gap in Windows Phone 7 launches is believed to have provided a window for rival Apple and Android-based handsets to launch in Australia, with the two operating systems (Android is supported by a clutch of hardware manufacturers, including those also promulgating Windows Phone 7 handsets) currently dominating Australia’s mobile phone market.

The Nokia Lumia 800 features 16GB of storage, an 8 megapixel camera, 512MB of RAM, a single-core 1.4GHZ Snapdragon CPU, a 3.7″ touchscreen running at a resolution of 800×480, and Windows Phone 7.5. It also comes with a micro-USB port. Unlike other smartphones like Samsung’s Galaxy Nexus, it doesn’t feature a near field communications (NFC) chip for mobile payments, which are becoming more popular in Australia.

Many of these specifications are similar to those of existing smartphones on the market. However, in Delimiter’s review of the Lumia 800, reviewer Jenneth Orantia praised the phone’s design, from its “beautifully-engineered” and colourful unibody polycarbonate casing, its curved glass display, slick user interface and “delightfully fluid and snappy” responsiveness. In the review, Orantia wrote:

“There’s no doubt about it, the Lumia 800 is a gorgeous phone. The simplicity, elegance and fully-stocked feature set of Windows Phone 7.5 paired with the stunning hardware design of the Lumia 800 amounts to a lethal combination that will change the game for both Nokia and Microsoft.”

“For Nokia, it’s the first smartphone that really innovates on all levels since the N95, and for Microsoft, it puts a much sexier face on its Windows Phone operating system, which is key for winning over more users. The distinctive design and eye-catching colour options will go a long way towards attracting everyday users, while the huge improvements in Windows Phone 7.5 should prove appealing for geeks and power users that are keen for something different.”

The Lumia 710 is a lower-end, lower-cost Windows Phone 7 phone; similar to the Lumia 800 but aimed at the mid-range market rather than the top-end.

opinion/analysis
Too little, too late? I’m really not sure.

There is no doubt that the Lumia 800 is a gorgeous little piece of kit, and it will stand out both in marketing campaigns in Australia as well as in users’ hands when they visit retail stores to test out different smartphone models. It really is *that* nice in the hand and that eye-catching when you’re using it. In addition, the Lumia 800 represents the first true fulfilment of the potential that the Windows Phone 7 operating system has promised for some time; in a very similar way that the HTC Desire represented the first true fulfilment of Android when it launched in Australia in April 2010.

However, Australia is expected to see an absolutely huge number of great new smartphones released over the next year. Some in particular, such as Samsung’s Galaxy S III, and Apple’s iPhone 5 (or whatever it will be called when it is eventually released), are virtually guaranteed to be instant winners, purely by virtue of the previous models which they are heir to.

The Lumia 800 will be released in Australia just after the Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona is held, where manufacturers like Samsung, HTC, Sony Ericsson and so on release details of their upcoming handsets. In addition, it will be released just a few months before Australians start to get excited about the next iPhone — I expect anticipation to start building sometime around June. Can Nokia prevail against this kind of competition, and, despite its strong history, from what many people will see as something of a standing start?

The company’s N9 handset, which shares most of the design of the Lumia 800, sank virtually without a trace in Australia when it was launched before Christmas. It will be interesting to see if Australian consumers will pay more attention when take 2, the Lumia 800, is launched in March. Can a new operating system make all the difference? Only time will tell.

Some more shots of the Nokia Lumia 800:

Image credit: Nokia

news Technology giant Oracle announced yesterday 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.

CRM On Demand is a subscription-based customer relationship management (CRM) system for service, sales, marketing and contact centre operations. Previously offered only as an offshore-hosted option, CRM On Demand was established by Oracle at an Australian datacentre in November 2010 to offer customers local hosting of their data.

Australia’s public sector establishments and financial institutions have had long-standing concerns with hosting their SaaS application data offshore. Oracle had revealed its plans to offer the CRM On Demand platform as a locally hosted service at Oracle OpenWorld 2010. This made Oracle one of the first multinational software giants to start offering SaaS from an Australian platform, in collaboration with hosting company Harbour MSP. Several other multinational cloud computing technology giants continue to prefer Singapore as the closest option for data hosting. Harbour MSP’s Australian datacentre is located in the huge Global Switch facility in Ultimo, Sydney.

According to a statement issued yesterday by Oracle, 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.

Grahame Coles, CIO, Department of Human Services, Victoria said that Oracle CRM On Demand’s ease of use, flexibility and innovation meets his company’s needs, while providing all the extra advantages of a hosted solution. “Providing the data locally makes the solution more compelling and provides us the ability to expand the footprint into other departmental needs,” Coles said.

Also stressing the platform’s reliability and flexibility, Simon Soon, CIO, AJ Lucas Group Limited said that the solution was implemented rapidly. He stated that the system’s compliance with local regulations also made for “peace of mind when storing data in the cloud”.

Teck Wee Lim, General Manager, CRM Oracle Asia Pacific explained that earlier, local regulations around data sovereignty acted as a hindrance to Oracle’s public and financial sector customers considering cloud computing. “Now we are able to overcome their concerns and meet their specific needs with our commitment to deliver industry-leading cloud computing solutions hosted at a local customer data centre” Lim stated.

The news comes as other major local enterprise software companies such as Salesforce.com, SAP, Microsoft and others have not over the latter half of this year and the first half of this year released the names of many major local customers, with it remaining unclear to what extent challenger firms such as Salesforce.com are having on the local market, against giant incumbents like Oracle.

Image credit: Oracle

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news Mike Sneesby (pictured) was yesterday announced as the Chief Executive of Cudo, the online group buying company that is a joint venture between Microsoft and Nine Entertainment Co (NEC).

The Cudo ‘deal of the day’ website is in its second year of trading after its launch on September 1st, 2010. One of Australia’s fastest growing local companies, Cudo claims to have sold more than one million vouchers since its launch and established itself as an essential growth partner for more than 3,000 small businesses. Cudo sends daily offers to over one million Australians, potentially saving them millions of dollars.

Sneesby described his new role as CEO of Cudo as a great opportunity as well as a challenge, and expressed his excitement about re-entering the Australian media industry. “Cudo delivers a great service for consumers and advertisers and I look forward to exploring new avenues to take the business. We are coming off a very strong base with great momentum and we have the team in place to continue to evolve and innovate our offering,” Sneesby said.

Speaking about his decision to step down, outgoing founder and CEO Billy Tucker said that it felt like the right time to leave Cudo. “In a relatively short space of time we have built an exceptional team who have turned Cudo into a household name. Mike is perfect for the next phase of growth at Cudo, I’m delighted that he has agreed to come back to Australia for the role and I know the business is in very safe hands,” Tucker stated.

Cudo has been in the news over the last year for more than just its accelerated growth graph. In May, Tucker had challenged Hitwise traffic data that showed rival company Groupon to have grabbed a major share of local web traffic shortly after its February launch. Prior to that, Cudo had sent a letter alleging copyright infringement to local group buying aggregation site Buyii.

The Director of Strategy and Digital, Nine Entertainment Co, David Coleman said that Cudo had grown into a significant digital business in a very short period. “We are looking forward to its further growth in the new year. The success of the company to date is a reflection of the great work of Billy Tucker in building the business from scratch,” stated Coleman.

Sneesby was previously the Vice President of IPTV and Technology at Intigral, a digital media joint venture between Saudi Telecom, the Saudi Research Marketing Group and Astro Malaysia. Sneesby had led Intigral’s IPTV business unit and headed operations and technology functions across the company (IPTV, Mobile and Web).

Before joining Intigral, Sneesby had headed Corporate Strategy and Business Development for ninemsn, setting up and developing high growth digital media businesses. He established “MSN New Zealand” and built it up into an award winning market leader in digital publishing. Before that, Sneesby worked at Singtel-Optus where he had led the migration of the company’s national broadband network.

The Group CEO of ninemsn, Mark Britt said that Sneesby was an exceptional executive having considerable experience in Australia and internationally. He named Cudo an important pillar in the group’s data and advertising strategy as they moved forward.

Speaking about his experience working with Sneesby, Britt highlighted his strong leadership skills and his record of delivering growth and innovation in digital media businesses. “Mike is joining Cudo following its amazing start-up year. Cudo could not have launched and delivered such outstanding results without Billy at the helm. It is testament to Billy’s hard-work, vision and sheer determination that Cudo has developed into one of the leading group buying companies in Australia,” said Britt.

Image credit: Mike Sneesby

blog International technology luminaries have a long history of arriving in Australia and delivering off the cuff comments about the National Broadband Network policy. Internet visionary Vint Cerf’s done it, then-Google chief executive Eric Schmidt’s done it and Mexican telco czar Carlos Slim has done it.

As I’ve written before, this practice has always irked me. The NBN debate is an incredible complex one, spanning not just the provision of broadband but the restructuring and future regulation of the telecommunications sector, winding back Telstra’s vertical integration and driving competition outcomes in the industry. For an outsider to come in and just throw their fairly uninformed opinion out there has always seemed arrogant.

That’s why I was so impressed with Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates’ response on the issue today, when asked in this video published by the Sydney Morning Herald. Gates said about the NBN:

“Yeah, I don’t know enough to really take a side on this issue. It’s definitely good to have a broadband network, and how you get there, whether you use private company competition, like Korea did, or whether you use government policies like some countries are, that’s a tough one.”

Perhaps Gates has read Delimiter’s guide to Australia for visiting tech celebrities and prepared himself for the inevitable NBN questions ahead of time? It’d be the smart man’s approach.

I have to say, thanks Bill. You’d have to be one of the only technology visionaries who I’ve ever seen admit that they didn’t know enough to comment. It’s that willingness to learn which has made you one of the richest men on the planet, and that humility which has resulted in you ploughing most of your money back in to help humanity develop globally. Kudos — we need more people like you. And one last question: If Gates admits he doesn’t know enough to comment on the NBN, what does that say about Tony Abbott?

Image credit: Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

blog The Sydney Morning Herald has a rather juicy article this morning about Bill and Melinda Gates and their family arriving down under for a little vacation. Hitting pricey restaurants, harbour cruises, staying at luxurious mansions kitted out with all kinds of electronic gadgetry — just another day in Sydney for the Gates, reportedly:

“On Friday, Gates was attempting to avoid being photographed aboard a luxury cruiser on the harbour. He was later seen disembarking with a jacket over his head, attempting to evade recognition with little success.”

One wonders whether the former Microsoft head honcho plans to spend any time razzing up the local troops? A visit by Gates could provide quite inspirational to some. Drop us a line through our anonymous tips line if you have any inside goss on what the Gates cavalcade is up to, and the same if you can grab any happy snaps of the Gatesmeister in action.

Image credit: Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

news The Queensland-based Courier Mail newspaper revealed this week that the state’s Labor Government has spent $46 million on its whole of government email platform, despite it so far catering to just 2,000 accounts.

Ros Bates, LNP Shadow Minister for Information and Communication Technology called Labor’s ‘IDES’ (Identity, Directory and Email Services) program a prime example of Labor’s long-term waste and mismanagement. “The Bligh government’s pattern of monumental waste continues. The $23,000 cost per user is the price of a family car,” said Bates.

The Courier-Mail reported on Tuesday that only 2000 people had signed up to use the system, which actually needs 81,000 users to break even. Still, Simon Finn, Information and Communication Technology Minister reportedly said that the project is within budget, and that the number of users, which is rising every week, is slated to reach 53,000 by the end of 2013.

Bates said that a similar type of waste had occurred with the Health payroll debacle when Queensland Health had in effect declared themselves exempt from good project management disciplines, project governance and pragmatic business process reform. With no Minister having been held responsible, Bates said that costs and charges were being passed on to taxpayers who were already struggling with the Bligh government’s increasing costs of living.

“For every hundred thousand dollars wasted, there are frontline service people who cannot be employed in our communities, child safety, schools and hospitals; there are resources and equipment that cannot be purchased for operating theatres, classrooms, or youth detention centres,” stated Bates.

In June 2010, Queensland Auditor-General Glenn Poole had also slammed the handling of the three huge Queensland Government technology consolidation projects, including the state’s ICT Consolidation Program (ICTC), the IDES project and the Corporate Solutions Program. The IDES project had already been delayed in implementation from the first quarter of 2009 to August 2009, after its launch in July 2008, as reported in ZDNet.

Bates lambasted the Bligh government as being arrogant and careless about taxpayer funds after 20 years in power. She accused the government of having wasted numerous chances to get situations like these under control.

“The Minister’s comment that it doesn’t matter because ‘it’s all the Government’s money’ shows how out of touch this government has become,” Bates said. “It is not Government money, it’s taxpayer money and it’s part of the booming debt soaring toward $85 billion which has to be paid back through taxes and charges on hard strapped Queensland families. Labor got another chance last time. Not again. Not this time,” she added.

opinion/analysis
You would think — you would really think — that this was one project that the Queensland Government couldn’t easily stuff up. After all, what they are basically doing here is something fairly simple: Setting up a colossal Microsoft Exchange email platform so that individual government departments don’t have to manage their disparate email platforms themselves. But no, Queensland has managed to stuff even this up.

What this demonstrates, in my opinion, is two things. Firstly, as a number of noted Australian technology analysts have been saying for some time, the nation’s experiment with vast IT shared services projects has failed. These systems are best farmed out to external outsourcers; who are just much better placed to provide these kind of services.

Secondly, yes, I do believe that the Labor Government’s inability to keep any IT project on the rails — even one focused on basic infrastructure, as this one is — says somewhat about its ability to govern. I don’t know whether the LNP in Queensland could do any better, but I think it’s probably about time they were given a chance to. They certainly couldn’t do any worse when it comes to IT management.

Image credit: Theo Kleen, royalty free. Opinion/analysis by Renai LeMay

news The Queensland State Government has appointed a new whole of government chief information officer, with industry insiders naming former state CIO Peter Grant as the most likely candidate to have returned to the role.

The state has been looking for a new whole of government chief information officer since at least late July, when Premier Anna Bligh publicly flagged plans to hire a new executive for what is slated to be a drastically expanded role with powers to resolve the state government’s legion of technology headaches.

The State’s ICT Minister Simon Finn and Natalie MacDonald, the director-general of its Department of Public Works, were scheduled to meet with all staff in the state’s office of the Queensland Government CIO this afternoon to inform them of the appointment and confirm that the office would shift from the Public Works portfolio to sit within the Department of Premier and Cabinet.

The meeting was confirmed by multiple sources, but the identity of the new whole of government CIO is not as concrete, with one source noting they believed Grant had been appointed to the role. The State has not yet commented publicly on the appointment.

If Grant does take the role back, his appointment will come as somewhat of a surprise to the technology industry in the state. Grant previously held the role from 2005 through 2008, after a lengthy career in the technology industry that had included a short stint as the CIO of Queensland Health, three years as a consultant and other periods as a vice president with analyst firm Gartner and time as the Director of IT at Queensland Transport.

However, he exited the role unexpectedly in December 2007, accepting a role as the state director for software giant Microsoft. That role lasted little over a year; following that Grant has worked as a consultant for analyst firm Intelligent Business Research Services, as well as holding posts as a professor of Information Systems at the University of Queensland and the Queensland University of Technology. Grant’s list of projects worked on at IBRS is extensive and comprehensively detailed on his lengthy LinkedIn profile.

Queensland has had a succession of IT disasters over the past few years that have rocked the State Government. The most public of these has been the Queensland Health payroll debacle, which resulted in thousands of public sector health workers going without pay after the department’s upgrade to a new SAP-based payroll system was botched, but many of the state’s other major IT projects have also overrun their budget and been delayed.

The problems culminated in a landmark announcement by Premier Anna Bligh in July that the state would appoint a new CIO role to report directly to Minister Finn. The new role will also be the first CIO role in Australia to sit at a CEO level in the government hierarchy, effectively making them the equal of the heads of major government departments.

This “autonomy”, with the office of the CIO being an independent body, would leave to a heightened ability to drive outcomes, according to Bligh. And the new CIO would also provide regular advice to Cabinet — effectively, the highest level within the Queensland Government.

The new CIO would be responsible for a number of areas of government activity, Bligh said, ranging from ICT program and project management, planning, and the implementation of the state’s overarching ‘Towards Q2′ technology strategy. Also under the CIO’s remit would be enterprise IT architecture, liaising with the industry and even keeping an eye on the state’s troubled shared services policy.

opinion/analysis
If Grant is appointed to be Queensland’s new whole of government CIO, I personally feel very strongly that he will be the wrong choice for the job.

On paper, Grant will be perfect for the role. There probably is nobody with as much experience in Queensland Government IT as the executive, and he also has national experience, academic experience, vendor experience … the list rolls on. He’s a class act and one of Australia’s top CIOs by any measure.

However, it bears a great deal of consideration that many of the IT disasters which have occurred within the Queensland State Government had their seeds sewn under Grant’s previous watch the last time he was State Government CIO. New powers or no, I feel strongly that Grant will not have the energy, grit and ‘push’ to shove through the sorts of reforms which Queensland so strongly needs right now. He will bring too much baggage from the past; and I also feel his Gartner and academic experience will perhaps not serve him well in what will necessarily be an intensely hands-on, departmental in-fighting warrior kind of role.

For this kind of job you need a demon vigilante who never rests. A consultancy style will not serve anyone in this job; you will need to knock heads together, break down doors and broadly take no prisoners of any kind.

Beyond this issue, of course, there is the fact that it is unlikely that anybody could be truly successful in this role.

As we’ve seen in Queensland, Victoria and NSW over the past half-decade, it has been conclusively shown that whole of government “super-CIOs” do not have the ability to enact the levels of change that they have been appointed to enact in Australian governments, as they are constantly mired by the lack of authority to gainsay departmental heads and strangled by systemic cultures of poor governance and a lack of accountability.

Even if Queensland’s new CIO does have equal status with the heads of the departments of education, transport, health and whatever else, that does not mean that they will be able to gainsay those executives; and still less will they be able to control what happens in the multiple layers of bureaucracy under them.

I’m sorry to be cynical, but I’ve been following Queensland’s rolling series of IT disasters for half a decade now. I personally (with fellow Fairfax Business Media writer Agnes King) broke the news that Grant was quitting to join Microsoft, four years ago. Not much has changed in the Queensland State Government in the meantime when it comes to technology … apart from the fact that, thanks to a damning series of audit reports, we now know just how bad things are. They’re probably as bad as they are in Victoria.

Image credit: Jamie Woods, royalty free

news Federal Labor MP Ed Husic has warned technology vendors hiking prices for the Australian market that criticism and examination of their pricing strategies would not cease, despite the fact that they had so far been largely unresponsive on the issue.

Since the start of this year, Husic has been attempting to get answers from technology giants about why they feel it’s appropriate to rise prices significantly above those found in America — leading to the so-called tech tax — for Australians. The MP has raised the issue with the vendors themselves, in the House of Representatives several times and directly with senior figures such as David Bradbury, Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasurer.

Treasurer and Deputy Prime Minister Wayne Swan indicated in late October that the Government is keenly awaiting a report from the Productivity Commission which will detail the extent to which price hikes on imported technology goods and services are hurting Australian consumers, as part of the Commission’s overall report into the retail sector.

However, in a new speech in Parliament last night (the full text of which is available online), Husic expressed his disappointment at the lack of response from the technology sector to the Productivity Commission’s enquirt in general. “I understand from inquiries I made today that the Productivity Commission has submitted its overall review into the Economic Structure and Performance of the Australian Retail Industry – which the IT pricing discrimination issue will form a part of,” he said.

“When I scanned the submissions listed on the Productivity Commission website, something else became glaringly obvious: Not a single one of the major vendors took the opportunity to make a submission to the Commission. It’s staggering that with all the interest in this matter, the vendors and companies like Adobe, Apple, Lenovo or Microsoft didn’t take the chance to comment.”
Husic said he suspected the vendors believed they could “ride out this sustained public focus”.

However, he maintained the issue would continue to be in the spotlight, quoting a consumer who made a submission to the Productivity Commission’s review: “I believe these enforced price differentials, especially for online downloads, are baseless and exploitative of the average Australian consumer, who will not complain about the price for the sake of convenience and minimal hassle,” he said.

Adobe and Microsoft have stated that much Australian pricing for their products was actually set by the local distribution channel, and that the issue is a broader one that applies not only to the technology sector.

One new avenue for Husic in criticising the vendors may be through the Federal Government’s own IT procurement practices, which are largely carried out through departmental chief information officers and their IT departments, as well as centrally through the Australian Government Information Management Office.

Husic said he intended to follow up within the Government to see what measures were in place to ensure it was getting value for money and that the “inflated prices” that were affecting consumers were not being felt by the public sector.

“Frankly, I think that we need to ensure that there is value for money for government, for consumers and for small business,” he said. “If they think they can ride this out, I would beg to differ and urge them actually to be a lot more transparent in the way that they approach this issue.”

Image credit: Alpha, Creative Commons

news Microsoft and Fujitsu this week revealed the findings from the pair’s first Insights Quarterly Report of Australian CIOs, offering a window into the issues steering IT strategy in Australia’s businesses and government bodies. The planned quarterly survey by independent research firm Connection Research found a high level of optimism among the 207 Australian CIOs who were part of the study.

The IQ series (available in full online) examines the impact of issues from cloud computing, ICT infrastructure and end-user computing to mobility, sustainability, social media and connectivity. Nearly half (46.2 percent) of the CIOs noted that rapidly changing business requirements constituted their most difficult challenge. CIOs do pay attention to new technologies, but their main focus is on continuing to make sure that their business stays reliable and efficient. Other challenges in order of importance are protecting and securing the network, optimising and controlling costs, and improving service responsiveness.

Greg Stone, Chief Technology Officer, Microsoft Australia believes that ICT does not live in isolation, but is a means to an end. “Effective CIOs are as much business managers as technology managers and the attitudes reflected in our survey confirm this strong shift in thinking,” Stone said in a statement associated with the report.

One out of five CIOs consider virtualisation as their top interest among ICT strategies, with more than two thirds giving it high relevance. The second most relevant ICT technology was integrated enterprise-wide access, with 42.5 percent rating it of high interest because it improves access to information.

Respondents rated cloud computing as both the most overhyped and the most important technology. Craig Baty, Chief Technology Officer, Fujitsu Australia and New Zealand said, “For many organisations the attraction of cloud computing lies in its combination of cost and business flexibility.” Meanwhile, wireless broadband was rated as underhyped by most CIOs; they believe more attention needs to be paid to this technology. Currently, social networking is regarded as overhyped by the surveyed CIOs.

Unfortunately, green ICT or ICT sustainability showed the lowest degrees of both investment and implementation, with printer management strategies being the most widely employed among these. Most organisations have not thought about strategies to utilise ICT to measure the energy consumption of their establishments. Stone pointed out the latest trend of employees expecting permission to use their own devices at work and to connect to the corporate network. This ‘Bring Your Own Device’ (BYOD) work culture is evident in mounting pressure on CIOs from end users to provide support for tablet computers.

The survey also found high level implementation in security with a relatively low level of planned investment. The highest investment is in recovery, backup, archiving, network security and intrusion detection, suggesting the high importance of business continuity. While a large number of businesses have implemented antivirus software, the survey found a low level investment and implementation of data encryption and data privacy.

The industries covered in the IQ survey were, in order of representation: Manufacturing, Government Administration and Defence; Health, Education and Welfare; Financial and Business Services; and Primary Industries, Utilities, Construction and Mining. Organisations with 100–500 employees accounted for 54.6 percent of the survey respondents.

opinion/analysis
We don’t usually run survey stories on Delimiter; because they’re usually quite useless and very slanted towards the outcomes which the vendor wants to achieve. You know the drill: A vendor commissions a piece of ‘independent’ research, which just happens to show that there is strong demand for their product of service. Journalists fall over themselves rushing to publish the “news”, and everyone — except the readers — is happy.

However, the Insights Quarterly report is a fair bit different from the norm. Having read through it, it does represent a substantial and interesting piece of research. I suspect much of this is because Craig Baty himself is a former group vice president at Gartner and a global vice president at Frost & Sullivan. Baty wouldn’t stand for sub-standard stuff being issued in Fujitsu’s name, and consequently. The IQ report actually appears to be quite useful.

There’s also the fact that it’s going to come out regularly. By the very nature of that commitment, Microsoft and Fujitsu will face down periods at times during the report’s production, where it may not always demonstrate the industry trends which they so desire. However, both are big enough and tough enough to weather this. For example, I will note that Fujitsu has been flooding my inbox with press releases about green or ‘sustainable’ ICT for the past six months — despite the IQ report demonstrating it was a low priority for CIOs.

My hope is that — like similar ongoing reports produced by local analyst firms like Longhaus — the IQ report will continue to develop into something useful in judging CIO sentiment in Australia’s IT industry.

Opinion/analysis contributed by Renai LeMay