news The Tasmanian Government has embarked on one of Australia’s largest known email platform upgrades, recently revealing plans to shift some 40,000 email accounts to the latest version of Microsoft’s Exchange platform as part of a wider shake-up of its communications strategy.

“The Tasmanian Government (Government) represented by TMD, (a division of the Department of Premier and Cabinet) is seeking to enter into arrangements with a suitably qualified and experienced Contractor to lead the upgrade of the Connect Email Service infrastructure from Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010, with the final infrastructure serving approximately 40,000 mailboxes,” the department said on its tendering website.

“TMD commissioned a high-level design from Microsoft Consultancy Services (Architecture and Design for Microsoft Exchange Server 2010), which details TMD’s current technical environment as well as the end-state environment that TMD is seeking assistance to develop and implement.”

It’s unclear why the Tasmanian Government is pursuing the upgrade, although Exchange 2010 offers users a number of advantages over the previous version, Exchange 2007, including an improved level of integration with Microsoft’s Office 2010 platform, as well as more robust disaster recovery and storage configurations, integration with cloud computing platforms, and even new rights management features around who can access which emails.

Exchange 2010 was released in October 2009. However, many Australian organisations are believed to be ‘sitting’ on Exchange 2007, which many see as offering a modern enough platform for most. Some organisations, for example Queensland Health, even see Exchange 2007 as being modern enough for new rollouts, with the organisation recently flagging plans to dump its existing GroupWise system for Exchange 2007.

Other major organisations known to have completed the upgrade include Melbourne’s Victoria University (which partnered with systems integrator Dimension Data on its rollout) and brewer Lion Nathan, which expected to save about $90,000 through reducing storage requirements through its own implementation.

Tasmania has also recently kicked off a number of other tendering initiatives in the communications space. It also recently commenced a search for a supplier to deliver it traditional telephony, ISDN and IP-based networking services from March next year, when its existing contracts end. And in November 2010, the state sough submissions from companies interested in providing it with broader voice and mobile telecommunications services.

Tasmania’s TMD division currently manages more than 25,000 government end point devices — usually telephones — through its TASINET managed fixed voice service — with the majority being delivered through Telstra’s CustomNet Spectrum platform.

There are other platforms which deliver voice services to the State Government as well — for example, IP telephony installations. Around 500 services use Microsoft’s Office Communications Server platform within departments such as DPC and the Department of Education corporate offices. In total, TMD services over 30,000 staff across more than 1,200 sites in the state in total (including TASINET). The State also has some 10,000 mobile phones, of which a number are delivered by Optus, as well as Telstra.

“The Government expects that in the future, voice and data services will be provided predominantly over a single, convered multi-service network — supported by a Government-owned IPv6 address allocation,” the state wrote in tendering documents at the time.

Know of an organisation engaged in a major email platform migration? Lotus Notes to Exchange? Groupwise to Gmail? Drop us a line through our anonymous tips box. Even we won’t know who you are.

Image credit: Sigurd Decroos, royalty free

blog Queensland Health has become the latest Australian organisation to ditch Novell’s ageing GroupWise platform in favour of Microsoft Exchange. iTNews, which broke the news, writes:

“Queensland Health has revealed it will bring the first of at least 50,000 users onto an Exchange 2007 email system early next year.”

This all sounds good and proper. After all, a stack of organisations right around Australia are currently migrating off GroupWise and IBM’s Lotus Notes platform onto Microsoft Exchange, or in some cases, Google Apps.

But what I can’t work out is why Queensland Health would move to Exchange 2007. As I’ve previously explored, Exchange 2010 comes with a number of features which are attractive to organisations. Better storage management (a key issue with Exchange), an improved Outlook Web Access platform and more. And it was released to manufacturing in October 2009, so it’s not exactly cutting edge code.

It’s not precisely clear at this point, but I’ll ping Queensland Health to ask the question. I guess it’s not outside the bounds of possibilities that the organisation is simply following the ‘N-1′ approach to software upgrades. We’ve seen this before … notably when the Federal Parliament deployed Windows Vista just last year.

It was only five years ago that diversified Australian company Amalgamated Holdings (AHL) caused controversy in Australia’s IT sector by becoming one of the few major groups to dump Microsoft’s Outlook/Exchange platform in favour of IBM’s troubled Lotus Notes/Domino suite. But now the company has gone back to Microsoft.

In December 2006, AHL revealed it would ditch an Outlook/Exchange install which was being used by parts of its business, as part of a wider consolidation plan. At the time, the company said it made sense to standardise the entire company on Notes, given the fact that it had dedicated business applications running on the IBM suite, as well as the more standardised collaboration tools.

AHL operates a number of entertainment and leisure facilities around the country and overseas — over 50 hotels and resorts, some 60 movie cinemas, the Thredbo Alpine Resort and more. Back in 2006, some of its core businesses — for example, the Rydges Hotel chain — was using Notes, and over the next year or so the company would, with the assistance of systems integrator IMC Communications, extend that install to the rest of its operations.

However, in a media release issued this week, IMC revealed AHL had gone back to its Microsoft roots.

“Due to the increased use of new technologies such as iPhones, PDAs and other smartphone technology, it became imperative that AHL update its Lotus Notes email collaboration platform,” a case study published by IMC this week states.

“The business decided that it needed to migrate over 2,000 mailboxes and users from Lotus Notes to the Microsoft Exchange platform,to further enhance business functionality and take advantage of easier ways to connect staff and enable staff productivity.”

“AHL investigated the options of managing the migration to Microsoft Exchange in-house, however it was deemed that the cost, time, skills and resources required, were too large for the business to independently cover. The answer was to outsource the migration process to IT specialists.”

In the end, as a number of other large Australian organisations have recently done, AHL and IMC decided to shift the company’s collaboration system onto Microsoft’s hosted Business Productivity Online Suite.

The decision meant the company’s several thousand email accounts were transferred across to Microsoft’s BPOS server farm, which IMC noted was based in Hong Kong. Microsoft has never directly disclosed where Australian BPOS customers have their data hosted, but the company does not maintain a BPOS datacentre in Australia.

The company’s closest BPOS facility geographically is believed to be located in Singapore.

The news comes as Australian organisations are increasingly migrating off platforms such as Lotus Notes and Novell GroupWise, which were popular throughout the past several decades but have not been able to maintain their position in the market compared with Microsoft’s popular Outlook/Exchange ecosystem, which is now extending into cloud computing services.

Google’s Apps platform is currently seen as the main competitor to Microsoft’s offerings for new email system installations, but the search giant has so far failed to make major in-roads into either the financial or public sectors in Australia, despite building a strong presence in small business and firms with distributed or franchised operations.

Image credit: Aidy Spencer, Creative Commons

Over at the new Delimiter Forum, I’ve posed a question for the ages: What’s your email client usage history? Over the years I’ve used a stack of different clients, from Mutt to Kmail, from Pine to Outlook, to Thunderbird and more. An excerpt from my post on the matter:

“I started off back in about 1991 or so with Eudora (don’t ask me which version, but it was in black and white) for the Mac as my first email client. It was basic, it just did what it needed to do, and I liked it. I think I actually still have the email archives from it sitting around somewhere. If I remember correctly, they might have even been in plain text format!”

The question of which email client to use has constantly been a discussion item in my geek life. There have just been so many different platforms over the years. Right now I’m standardised on Google Apps, but if something better came long I would definitely consider switching.

We’ll highlight selected threads and posts from the new Delimiter Forum on Delimiter itself. Remember, any user can start their own thread — if it’s a good one, we’ll highlight it on Delimiter as well.

Image credit: Dave Edwards

opinion For the past several years, many Australian chief information officers and IT managers have been hard-locked into choosing between just two options when it comes to evaluating the future of their email systems.

On the one hand has been the stalwart and ever-reliable Microsoft Outlook/Exchange; the safe choice; the feature-rich choice; the controllable and manageable choice; the suit and tie choice and most certainly the choice of Generation X and most of the baby boomers. Nobody ever got fired for buying Exchange.

But coming up fast from behind has come the new, cool kid on the block; the choice of Generation Y, the online-only, remotely hosted, software as service, cloud computing favourite; the ever-threatening Google Apps/Gmail alternative.

The only problem is, for many Australian CIOs, neither platform has been a fantastic long-term alternative for their in-house email needs, despite their relative strengths. If you speak to them about it, many IT executives will acknowledge that email is a technology which is rapidly becoming commoditised. They are looking for ways in which to offload email services to an external provider and take much of the cost of maintaining in-house Exchange systems off their balance sheets.

And yet using Exchange doesn’t play that well into this story. Whether you rollout Exchange as an in-house deployment, a managed service or outsource it completely to someone else’s datacentre or even to Microsoft’s cloud, the cost of maintaining the platform, buying Outlook licences and so on is not the lowest it could be.

However, shifting your whole organisation onto Gmail also has its problems.

The lack of on-shore hosting (or any real idea about which jurisdiction, in fact, your email will be hosted in), Gmail’s lack of the fine-grained features which Outlook offers, its diminished integration with the rest of Microsoft’s Office, Active Directory and Lync software stack … the list goes on. Gmail is far from perfect; and Google is far from responsive to customer requests for change in its global platform.

However, like many dichotomies, the Exchange/Gmail dichotomy is a false one; a fact proved by this week’s revelation by Jetstar chief information officer Stephen Tame that the airline had chosen not one of the two major email platforms on offer; but both.

Jetstar’s email strategy — which will see most of its corporate head office staff continue to use Outlook/Exchange, with most of the rest of the company (its support staff) shifted to Gmail, represents a viable way forward for many Australian organisations currently troubled by the false email dichotomy.

Tame, like many of his colleagues at other companies, has correctly recognised the fact that most of his company’s staff do not require feature-rich Exchange mailboxes. Yet he has also recognised the fact that some do.

By extracting various pieces of the email puzzle (security, archiving, etc) out from the traditional email paradigm, and setting up routing rules to ensure each platform handles the mail accounts associated with it, Tame has not only been able to achieve a practical solution to a problem which most have seen as being impossible to resolve without serious development work being done by either Microsoft or Google; and one that will also please all stakeholders within Jetstar.

The company’s head office will keep the Exchange platform its complexity demands, the rest of Jetstar’s staff will have a simpler but still highly functional alternative, and Jetstar’s chief financial officer Tristan Freeman is no doubt singing Tame’s praises right now to the company’s board.

Best of all, as Jetstar staff gain experience and move up the ranks to head office, taking Gmail with them, there will likely be a natural effect where Google’s platform will start to percolate through the entire organisation, reducing the long-term need for a dedicated heavy Exchange platform as staff better understand the benefits of software as a service platforms through direct exposure.

It’s a model which could easily be applied to many other industries. It’s not hard to argue, for example, that major banks, educational institutions, government departments and other commercial entities all have many so called ‘boundary workers’ which should rightfully be served with low-cost, low-priority and primarily outsourced technology solutions which meet their reduced needs when compared to the information workers who reside in corporate head offices.

We’ve seen many shadows of this many times in the past … the Commonwealth Bank of Australia was no doubt thinking along these lines when it evaluated Google Apps as an office suite back in 2006 and early 2007; and the current interest in thin client terminals and virtualised desktops is just another example; as is the self-provided IT movement, which seems to gain in strength every time a salesperson brings an iPad to work and demands that the company’s CRM platform work on it through the web.

Of course, Tame’s solution wasn’t the only one to his dilemma.

Exchange 2010 has a nifty feature which allows some mailboxes to be hosted in an on-premises facility, while others are hosted within Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure. And you can easily migrate mailboxes between the two.

Tame could have just as easily shifted most of Jetstar’s mailboxes into a cloud operated by Microsoft or a partner like CSC and locked most staff into only accessing their mail through Outlook Web Access, while corporate HQ used a local Exchange server throughout Outlook. This sort of option would likely have achieved the same goal as the Google option; although it probably would have cost more.

But overall, I like Tame’s strategy better.

The reason is that it demonstrates a contempt for the ideal of ‘technology for technology’s sake’ and the sorts of ‘one vendor’ pure solutions which so many technologists get hung up on, and put the focus squarely on using pieces of technology as the flexible Lego building blocks that they truly are.

False dichotomies are always set up in our minds because we have been conditioned to think a certain way; we convince ourselves that there is no other way to do things. Tame’s lesson to Australia’s IT industry this week — and a lesson he has been teaching us throughout his entire career — is that it’s OK … in fact, it’s usually best — to think different.

Image credit: Sarah Barth (photographer’s blog), royalty free

Westpac Banking Corporation, one of Australia’s largest users of IBM’s besieged Lotus Notes/Domino ecosystem, has finally confirmed it is ready to dump the platform in favour of Microsoft’s rival Outlook/Exchange system, in a move which constitutes the latest nail in the coffin for Notes in Australia.

The bank has been a Lotus user for more than a decade, backed by its lengthy comprehensive technology outsourcing agreement with IBM. But despite renewing its vows with Big Blue for a further five years last November, Westpac today confirmed it had filed divorce papers with its troubled email platform.

“Westpac is currently reviewing its email requirements,” a bank spokesperson said in a brief statement this afternoon, “and looking forward to migrating all Westpac staff to Microsoft Outlook.” The bank could not confirm any further details, but people with knowledge of the situation said it intended to migrate to the latest version of Microsoft’s platform — Exchange 2010 — over the next 18 months with the support of both existing partner IBM and Japanese IT services giant Fujitsu.

The move will constitute one of the largest Lotus to Exchange migrations in Australia’s history, as the bank has some 39,000 staff — dwarfing even the shift by Qantas in 2010 of its 20,000 staff to Exchange, and other rollouts such as the ones conducted by financial services giant AMP and Coca-Cola Amatil.

It is not known to what extent Westpac uses Notes’ broader functions in its operations beyond email. Many organisations who have been using the platform for years, as Westpac has, have taken advantage internally of the all-encompassing development environment which Notes provides. It can be a complex exercise for much of that functionality to be migrated onto Microsoft’s platform — often involving the use of the software giant’s SharePoint collaboration portal, for example.

Some organisations are still happy with Lotus, however — such as Australian youth charity BoysTown, which has remained with Notes/Domino and even upgraded the platform, citing the extensibility of IBM’s solution compared with that of rivals.

The next major known shift from Lotus Notes/Domino to Exchange will likely take place at new super-agency the Department of Human Services, which in June last year revealed it was likely to end the long-running relationship which some of its component agencies have had for years with Notes, as part of its massive technology consolidation — which recently received a funding boost worth hundreds of millions of dollars in the Federal Budget.

Various agencies to be consolidated — especially Centrelink and Medicare Australia — have used the ailing Notes platform for years. But in an interview last year, the department’s technology chief John Wadeson said it was likely that the new super-department would standardise on Exchange.

“I couldn’t say that it was set in stone, but we are at this minute certainly looking at moving to a Microsoft platform in that layer,” he said.

Opinions differ vastly between technology sector workers about the merits of the two platforms, with many preferring either one — or even Google’s Apps suite. However, common reasons cited by chief information officers for the ongoing migrations from Notes include the belief that it doesn’t support third-party devices such as mobile phones as well, and the powerful integration between Outlook/Exchange and the rest of Microsoft’s enterprise software stack and unified communications platforms built by vendors like Cisco (which Westpac also uses).

Image credit: Winam, Creative Commons

opinion If there is one thing I am absolutely sick to death of, it is the pathetic rantings of die-hard Lotus Notes fanboys about how technically superior their product is, and how everyone else who isn’t drinking the IBM kool-aid is somehow incredibly “biased” and don’t understand Notes’ obvious superiority.

Let me walk you through an average day in these people’s lives.

Courtesy of their Google Alerts set on key search terms like ‘Lotus Notes’ and ‘Domino’, when they slouch cringingly into their Office Space-esque working environments just before 9AM every morning, they receive an annotated list of stories posted on global websites about how yet another mega-corporation has dumped Notes, typically in favour of the ultimate evil and hated destroyer of worlds, Microsoft Exchange.

Instantly, and despite the fact that this happens every day, the fingers of these Lotus Notes’ fanboys tighten in terror around their 1980′s IBM-branded coffee mug filled with weak herbal tea. Their throat seizes up as if they are having an asthma attack, and a series of short, disjuncted noises issue from their mouth as they gaze fixatedly at the screen, their beady eyes unable to look away from what they perceive as a horriffic event.

Then, setting the tea down shakily, these Lotus fanboys scrabble with gnarled fingers at the keyboard and mouse until they find the comments section of the website concerned. “BIAS!!!” they scream. “This journalist must be BIASED against Lotus! He’s on the Microsoft payroll! Look at all the Microsoft advertisements on the site! It’s a CONSPIRACY!”

They then proceed to outline in amazingly detailed prose the technical reasons why the Lotus Notes/Domino ecosystem is inherently better than Microsoft’s Outlook/Exchange alternative. The extensibility of the platform. The number of third-party additions. Its easy upgrade path. The fact that you can now get it “in the cloud” with Lotus Live. Its better security and integrated collaboration features.

And the list goes on.

Without fail, they punctuate their article with yet another, slightly more veiled jab at the journalist writing the article, before collapsing briefly into their chair as their anger dissipates and they raise their mug of herbal tea once again as a knight in the Crusades would have raised his sword, believing that they have righted all wrongs and put the world to harmony once more. “I showed him,” they think, and start preparing the daily email to their chief executive justifying why their company’s Lotus email system won’t sync with his mobile phone.

We received the perfect example of this yesterday, after we published an article about local company Steinhoff shifting to Microsoft’s hosted BPOS platform.

“This is the most emotive and biased article I have read for a long time. This is not information, it is Microsoft propaganda and shows your organisation and your so-called reporting to be nothing but an arm of the Microsoft marketing,” screamed an individual named Paul. “Grow up and give us some real news backed by facts, not your obviously biased opinion.”

Thanks Paul. I deleted your comment, because unlike those of other readers, it had nothing constructive to add to the conversation. Actually, I enjoyed doing so, because I am a former systems administrator and I can be petty like that at times (see the Bastard Operator from Hell). But I re-publish it here as a prime example of the case I have described above.

The problem with Lotus Notes fanboys is that they are incredibly hypocritical. Long-term readerswill know that this author has written dozens of articles over the past several years about email platform migrations in large organisations. Yes, many of the stories have been about Notes/Domino customers migrating to Microsoft Outlook/Exchange, and there is an undeniable trend in this direction. However, we’ve also written many stories about organisations migrating off every platform under the sun and onto Google’s Apps suite, which is in direct competition with both IBM and Microsoft’s options.

But here’s the thing: The Lotus Notes fanboys never come out of the woodwork to discuss the situation when a Microsoft customer goes Google — or even onto another platform like Zimbra. They only get excited and jump up and down when Lotus is involved. They have absolutely no interest in discussing organisations’ actual email needs logically and rationally in the context of their businesses — they just want to impotently scream bloody murder whenever their personal lovechild takes a bodyblow.

Ironically, whenever we write a story about an organisation ‘going Google’, it’s the Microsoft fanboys who list us as their number one public enemy. I’d bet Microsoft fanboys are probably a little better dressed than Lotus fanboys, but they still scream similar things at us.

“BIAS!” they scream. “Gmail is not ready for the enterprise! It’s insecure because it’s hosted overseas and the US Patriot Act means the Government can see up your skirt! Look at all the Google ads on the site! This journalist must be on the Google payroll! It’s a CONSPIRACY!”

It’s remarkable how similar Lotus and Exchange fanboys are — almost as if they were separated at birth. It would be as if Pauline Hanson and Sarah Palin were originally twins but grew up in separate households and came to form the same ridiculous views but for completely different reasons.

Right. Now that I’ve insulted all of the Lotus Notes fanboys sufficiently to get their attention and send the Google Alerts emails springing like demonic hyperactive mice into their inboxes, I want to get to the real point of this article: To issue an open amnesty and invitation to them in bulk.

The thing about most technology journalists is that although each probably has an email platform that they prefer, because we’re all heavy users of email, we’re not usually paid to express an opinion about that (although sometimes we do) — we’re usually paid to report on the news of the day and describe what’s happening out there in IT departments around the world.

I say this to make the point that I would LOVE to report on new deployments of Lotus Notes/Domino. I’m FASCINATED with the current state of enterprise collaboration (as geeky as that may sound) and I’ve been reporting on this space for the better part of a decade now, after working as a systems administrator on mail systems and other assorted and sundry items myself.

The problem is that I simply have not been able to find any new deployments of Lotus Notes/Domino in Australia at all for the past several years, so despite my best efforts to the contrary, I have to go on reporting new Exchange and Google Apps deployments — and even new Zimbra rollouts — because I simply do not know of any new Lotus ones.

Where possible, I have reported on Lotus Notes upgrades. I really enjoyed doing that, because I got the chance to tell a different story from the same old, Organisation X dumps Lotus Notes for Exchange/Google Apps yadda yadda yadda. And also, again, as dumb as this sounds, I like talking to IT managers, systems administrators and CIOs about their systems. I’m just wired that way.

So today I am issuing an OPEN INVITATION and AMNESTY to Lotus Notes fanboys.

If you come up with an Australian organisation who is deploying a new installation of Lotus Notes/Domino of 100 seats or more, I will guarante to interview them. I will guarantee to write a story of at least 500 words and probably longer about their deployment. If they will let me and it is in Sydney, I will even physically travel to their office and do a video interview with them.

This guarantee also extends in part to those upgrading old installations of Lotus Notes. I guarantee that if you can come up with an organisation of 500 seats or larger who is upgrading their copy of Notes/Domino, I will guarantee to interview them as well and publish a story.

I issue this amnesty so that it is on the public record that I am not a “BIAS” journalist and that I am interested in email platforms of all stripes. If I break my word on this, please feel free to slander me in public as much as you want to.

But, Lotus Notes fanboys, here’s the kicker.

If I do not receive any invitations to interview Australian Lotus Notes customers over the next 12 months, you must acknowledge this. You must acknowledge that IBM’s precious email and collaboration platform is suffering a slow and prolonged death by a thousand cuts, and that it will shortly be consigned to the graveyard of history as Microsoft and Google divide up its once strong empire between them.

If, Lotus Notes fanboys, you do not come up with the goods in the next 12 months and let me know about some new Notes/Domino customers, you must quit your incessant bitching that journalists are “BIASED” and walk away. It would make me extremely happy if you then undertook Microsoft or Google re-education and admitted the error of your ways, because then I could laugh at you and point out that you had sold out to one or both evil empires, and that if you were real men, the truth is that you should never have stopped using EMACS in the first place and that graphical user interfaces are for wimps.

Happy?

Image credit: The film Jerry Maguire, the “Show me the money” scene

blog Regular readers will know of the somewhat … intense debate that has been going on between various factions in the Delimiterverse over the past few months with relation to the question of what is the best corporate email platform.

On the one hand you’ve got the centralised command and control communist shock troops representing Microsoft’s dominant Outlook/Exchange ecosystem, while on the other side of the coin you’ll find the idealistic dreamers; the flower power hippy love children evangelising Google Apps.

Now without going into the specifics of that debate, I’d like to pose a question: Is there room for a substantive third player? And I’m not looking at you, Lotus Notes; you’ve had your day and will now shortly be consigned to the graveyard where bloated legacy software suites go to sleep until you are awakened for a second open source renewal.

The reason I ask is because of this interesting little job advertisement posted this week by that doyenne of virtualisation, VMware, relating to its Zimbra collaboration suite, which has recently slipped in between the covers with that hot young thing, iiNet. Writes VMware:

The Zimbra Solution representative — ANZ is responsible for building Zimbra’s local business in ANZ. [The successful applicant will] build a local Zimbra community of partners, customers and developers to promote open source email and collaboration [and] establish Zimbra as the open source leader in the local market by holding off-site events, speaking at open source and software events in ANZ.

Frankly, I haven’t used or administered Zimbra myself, but I’m informed the solution is fairly robust … and clearly iiNet — an innovator itself — must believe in the package if it is prepared to commit a million mailboxes to it. So let’s hear your thoughts. The Google Apps vs Exchange war is still raging in Australia … but could Zimbra come in unexpected and sideswipe them both?

Image credit: Adam Blum, royalty free

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

Like many executives, Scinaptic chief executive James Fox started work early, with a job as a paperboy at age 10. These day’s he’s focused on different things — the company’s OnePlaceMail product connects various Microsoft products like Outlook and Office with SharePoint — but he still has that energy and drive to get him up in the morning. Fox is this week’s guest on the Friday Five.

What was your first job ever?

My first paid job was a paperboy at age 10. I was a paperboy for about 3 years and it provided me a great opportunity to learn the basics of building relationships and selling to people of very diverse backgrounds.

At the time, I built up the paper round to sell confectionary, magazines and cigarettes (in the bad old days). I was responsible for providing my opinion of the ‘best’ paper of the day: The Daily Mirror or The Sun. As it turns out, I made more money from selling confectionary than papers (If I didn’t eat the profits).

What do you most like about working in the IT/telco/gaming industry?

The IT industry never sleeps. I don’t think I have ever looked at my watch to see how long we have left in the day! If I do, it is in disbelief that it is that time already!

As an industry, we are capable of achieving so much; completely transforming business processes and creating whole new business models. The part I like most about the industry is the opportunity to engage with so many different types of business, learning how they operate and understanding the people who make it happen.

What’s your hobby?

I really enjoy participating in all sorts of sports. I have been an active member of surf lifesaving for about 8 years and enjoy catching a few waves. I have a young family and really treasure time with my wife and kid/s (another one on the way). Travel will always be in my blood

Where do you think the Australian IT/telco/gaming industry will be in five years?

Australia is in a unique and desirable position to lead the world in high-tech solutions. We have some of the brightest and most entrepreneurial people in the world, and as a country we have already built respect with trading partners in the UK, USA and Asia. With proximity to Asia, we in an ideal geography to benefit from the growth in this region while not forgetting the opportunities available to us in our other markets.

Assuming we get the basics right around continuous quality education and providing the ideal broadband infrastructure, Australia will benefit greatly by supporting businesses in their ability to design, build and market intellectual property for export. The IT industry within Australia will continue to innovate and lead by example with these basics in place.

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

I think travel has been my biggest inspiration. Through travel, I have been able see so many places and people. You could not experience this by reading a text book or on the internet. With such a short amount of time to do so many things, and contrary to the stereotypical image of the IT person, the IT industry provides a real means to travel, meet people and ultimately work in any industry you wish.

Image credit: Scinaptic

Google this morning fired a broadside directly into the good ship Microsoft, claiming victory over the email platforms of several large Australian companies — Flight Centre and Ray White. But why did the pair choose to dump their incumbent Outlook Exchange platforms and ‘go Google’?

Speaking at an event hosted by the search giant in Sydney this morning, IT chiefs at both companies revealed it was primarily a good cultural match between Google and their own organisations that fuelled the relationship.

The problem of storing data offshore, outside Australia’s legal jurisdiction, is often mentioned as a barrier to adopting Google Apps (especially in the public sector) — and indeed, Google was unable to provide Australian examples of large government customers at today’s event. However, security wasn’t a problem for either Flight Centre or Ray White– although both noted they had closely examined the issue — and both stated they wouldn’t keep sensitive company information such as financial documents on Google’s platform.

Flight Centre CIO Peter Wataman said his company had evaluated a variety of email platforms when deciding to move from his company’s Exchange environment (hosted by IBM) — platforms hosted internally or managed by a service provider, or in the cloud. The choices were narrowed down quickly, and Flight Centre now has some 3,000 users on the platform, with the plan being to roll out Google’s applications outside Australia by the end of the financial year.

“To be brutally honest with you, the key decision was not only around the technology, but [also] the cultural alignment,” he said.

When Flight Centre was evaluating the technology, Wataman said, his team went out to the company’s staff in a survey and asked them whether they had used anything like Gmail before. Somewhere between 80 to 90 percent of the staff said they had.

The second question asked, he said, was whether the staff would use the technology in a work environment — and over 85 percent said yes. “Our people were very excited about it — we were actually being asked when it was coming,” Wataman said, noting that staff generally didn’t get that excited about technology upgrades.

It took Google about six months — starting from 12 months ago — to convince Flight Centre to shift to Google Apps, Wataman said. It was a large decision — the company has about 100 terabytes of data wrapped up in its email systems, and it had disparate systems scattered around the globe.

Other attractive factors around the Google platform included the fact that Flight Centre wouldn’t need to update its systems simultaneously around the globe — with upgrades being slipped seamlessly into Google’s cloud platform. In addition, new, “crazy” features were to be integrated in the next six months, Wataman said — a short time frame which impressed Flight Centre.

It was a similar situation at Ray White, which this morning revealed it had rolled out Google Apps to some 10,000 staff in total, in addition to building a property management system on top of Google’s App Engine. Like Flight Centre, Ray White had been running Outlook and Exchange — although it also provided a much simpler POP-based email platform to its wider network.

Ben White, the company’s director of IT & property management, said the company had never had an ability to merge its culture with technology upgrade cycles. The company’s dispersed model meant it had a culture which was fundamentally about empowerment — with White describing Ray White as being composed of “1,000 businesses, all run by entrepreneurs”.

In comparison, the traditional IT model was more about “command and control … enforcing policies and telling people what to do”.

“In many respects, we’ve sat out IT for the past ten years,” said White — noting that most of Ray White’s offices had invested in their own infrastructure — servers and so on — to suit their own tastes.

As a consequence, the company thinks about Google Apps as less about just an email story — and more about how the company could build a platform for its internal entrepreneurs to building their businesses on. Hence the company — starting two years ago — has built what it calls its ‘Generation 5′ platform based on Google Apps.

The company now has seven different applications built on Google Apps (two of which are the property management system and a new online advertising solution) which comprise that portfolio. “We don’t have a single server any more on that side of the business,” said White. And the exciting thing for the executive is actually the future.

“The ‘To Do’ list is longer than when we started,” he said. “It’s exciting, quick — it’s about ideas. That’s the culture that we have as a company.”

Image credit: Google