Delimiter » Peter Nikoletatos

Nikoletatos swaps Curtin for ANU

Nayantara Mallya, Chillibreeze — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 22:52:15 +0000

news High-profile Curtin University chief information officer Peter Nikoletatos has left his role to take up a similar position at the Australian National University.

As the new Director of Information Services and Chief Information Officer at the Australian National University, Canberra, comes with an impressive background. Nikoletatos had held the position of CIO at the University of Newcastle, and Vice-President, CAUDIT Executive at CAUDIT Incorporated (the collaboration group for Australian university CIOs), before he took over as chief information officer at Perth’s Curtin University, where he served from 2008 till he joined the Australian National University in February this year.

It appears this story was first reported by iTWire, but Nikoletatos has made the change public on his LinkedIn and Twitter profiles.

Nikoletatos has many achievements to his credit. Curtin is one of Australia’s largest universities, and as of June 2011, had almost 45,000 students and more than 3,400 staff on nine different campuses. It migrated students to Microsoft’s hosted Live@EDU email platform over the past few years, in a move that affected almost 192,000 students and alumni. As CIO, Nikoletatos considered using Microsoft’s hosted email platform for staff as well. Nikoletatos had acknowledged Microsoft partner Dimension Data’s good work in helping the University shift to Office 365.

According to their respective LinkedIn and Twitter profiles, Nikoletatos was replaced at Curtin by Ian Hill, formerly the Associate Director Infrastructure at Curtin. Hill had held other positions with Curtin, including Acting Director, IMS, Manager, Quality & Policy, and Assistant Director, Centre for Educational Advancement.

In November 2010, Nikoletatos had stated that 300-400 iPad tablets had been bought by the Curtin University staff, either out of their own pocket or paid for by the University. Nikoletatos had outlined some of the benefits of the tablet, such as portability, light weight and rapid information access. “We’re moving away from fat client applications — the browser will be king in five years’ time,” he had said. Commenting on Apple as an innovative company, Nikoletatos had also opined that it was highly secretive, offering little information prior to the launch of new products.

A couple of months prior to that, in September 2010, Optus Cloud Solutions had announced the launch of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) delivered through the Optus ‘Evolve’ IP network. Curtin had been one of the handful of enterprise customers that had trialled Optus’ cloud services beta launch. Along with benefits to the Curtin community, the Optus Cloud Computing Solution was used to support a major astronomy project. “Researchers like to have the flexibility to manage their IT requirements based on a switch on, switch off basis. We see a real opportunity to provision bespoke environments for researchers so they can access computing on demand. This model could also be potentially extended to students as we progress along the cloud journey,” Nikoletatos had explained.

Under Nikoletatos’ leadership, Curtin and ANZ Bank had planned to deploy Microsoft’s Surface multi-touch tabletop system. Nikoletatos had said that the platform would enable new opportunities for collaboration and provide an “engaging educational tool”.

opinion/analysis
I don’t see Nikoletatos as merely a ‘keeping the lights on’ type of chief information officer. We haven’t heard a lot from ANU over the past few years when it comes to technology infrastructure change that leads to better educational outcomes. However, I think that’s about to change, with a change agent like Nikoletatos taking up the CIO role. My bet is that he has been consciously hired to drive a positive program of IT change at ANU. It will be interesting to see what his approach will be at one of Australia’s oldest and most venerable institutions.

Image credit: Peter Nikoletatos. Opinion/analysis by Renai LeMay

iPad influx: Curtin Uni flooded with “hundreds”

Renai LeMay — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 04:28:21 +0000

Like Macquarie University in Sydney, Western Australia’s Curtin University has also been swamped with iPads, with chief information officer Peter Nikoletatos yesterday stating between 300 and 400 of the tablets had made their way into university staff hands since Apple launched the iPad in Australia in May.

Some of the tablets have been paid for by staff out of their own wallet, while some have been purchased for the university, the CIO told journalists at Gartner’s annual Symposium event in Sydney yesterday. “At the moment it’s in the hundreds … three to four hundred staff have iPads at the moment,” he said. The university has published a working paper for the staff with details of applications that they might find useful.

The comments echo similar sentiments made by Macquarie University CIO Marc Bailey in late October. At the time, Bailey said the institution had initially been responding to staff requests for the tablet on an ad-hoc basis.

But the situation snowballed and it quickly had to develop a more standardised corporate approach. “It became pretty clear within weeks of launch that it was going to become huge,” he said.

By September, the university had developed what Bailey described as a “coordinated turnkey approach” to the situation, working closely with Apple to do so. Staff can now order iPads directly from Macquarie’s Information Technology Services division. If a tablet breaks, they send it back centrally for a replacement — the same as with most other organisational computing resources.

Corporate Express CIO Garry Whatley — also at the Gartner briefing — said his company was also running an iPad trial, although it only had about a dozen or so of the devices. “I’ve found I use very little paper these days — I take it into meetings,” he said. And the CIO has stopped reading printed magazines, preferring to consume the media through the iPad interface.

Nikoletatos — who waved around his own iPad during the presentation — said some of the benefits of the tablet were that it was highly transportable, lightweight, and information could be accessed in seconds. In general, he said, he was seeing a trend towards information and applications being delivered through the web browser platform. “We’re moving away from fat client applications — the browser will be king in five years’ time,” he said.

Adelaide University has taken the step of actually calling it quits with paper textbooks — the institution will hand out free iPads to students enrolling in a science degree in 2011, claiming the new Apple tablets will revolutionise the way science is taught.

Nikoletatos said Curtin would love to do that — although a discussion would be needed as to whether the cost of the tablets was included as part of the fees for the subjects. “If the government wants to provide them for it for free, then I’ll take that phone call,” he laughed.

Caveats
But not all is perfectly rosy in the iPad world just yet. It has become common practice amongst executives in many industries to transfer files to their Dropbox cloud sharing account and then view the documents on the iPad. Nikoletatos said the university was mindful of the sort of data that could be moved into Dropbox and the sort that it shouldn’t.

“Security’s been one of our concerns,” agreed Whatley. However, the CIO noted most of the problems had been alleviated — iPads could be “remote killed” and virtual private networks used, for example.

In addition, Nikoletatos said that while Apple was “an extremely innovative company”, it was also “highly secretive”, noting nobody was quite sure when the company was planning to launch new products, and there had been “about nine different dates” guessed at for the next 4.2 version of the company’s iOS mobile platform, which is slated to add a number of enterprise manageability features.

In addition, Nikoletatos confirmed it wasn’t yet possible to retrieve applications from individuals’ personal iTunes accounts if they had been paid for from the university’s purse but then left. “At the end of the day, it’s an individual’s responsibility to return every asset,” he said.

In addition, although Curtin had successfully procured a corporate 3G data plan which included a “bucket” model for consuming mobile data, Nikoletatos said some configuration had had to be carried out to make sure the right Access Point Name (APN) identifier was being used.

Image credit: Apple

Curtin Uni, ANZ Bank to deploy Microsoft Surface

Renai LeMay — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 01:20:02 +0000

Western Australia’s Curtin University of Technology and ANZ Bank have both flagged plans to deploy Microsoft’s Surface multi-touch tabletop system, which went on sale in Australia today.

The platform — which was first announced in May 2007 — has been available internationally for some time, and has been used for purposes as varied as military tactical overviews and in restaurants. It provides a computer screen as large as a small table that acts as a touch screen that users can interact with.

Curtin chief information officer Peter Nikoletatos said the platform would foster new collaboration opportunities and provide “an engaging educational tool”, in a statement issued by Microsoft this morning, although he did not reveal exactly how the university would use the technology.

ANZ group general manager of innovation and former CIO, Peter Dalton, said the bank would use the experience gained from using Surface to work out how it could use touch and surface-based technologies to make managing money simpler and more exciting. The bank had already showed off two Surface units at the Australian Open tennis in Melbourne last month.

Four Australian partners have signed up build applications and solutions on top of surface. They are local digital marketing agency Amnesia Razorfish, IT services outfit Object Consulting, software firm nsquared and digital product design agency Automatic Studio.

Microsoft Australia managing director Tracey Fellows said the software giant had received “strong interest” from Australian organisations in Surface, including from developers that wanted to create applications “not possible with other technologies”.

In the statement, Microsoft did not disclose Australian pricing for Surface, however technology site techAU reported a retail Surface unit would sell for AU$21,000, compared to US$12,500 in the United States, with the developer unit selling for A$24,000 locally and US$15,000 in the US.

Image credit: Microsoft