news The nation’s largest telco Telstra late last week confirmed it had started offering Cisco’s low-profile Cius Android tablet to customers as a complement to their corporate unified communications platforms.

The tablet shares a number of specifications with the current flock of consumer-focused Android tablets, shipping with a 7″ touchscreen running at a resolution of 1280×720 pixels, 802.11 b, g and n Wi-Fi support, mini-USB and HDMI ports and a camera than can record 720p HD video.

However, where the likes of the Motorola Xoom, Samsung Galaxy Tab, Acer Iconia Tab and so on are aimed at the same consumer market which Apple’s iPad has been so successful in, Cisco’s tablet falls on the other side of the fence. Cisco aims to use the device to complement its existing strengths in the corporate unified communications market, with the Cius being another endpoint for accessing corporate directories, placing and receiving calls and engaging in instant messaging and videoconferencing sessions. Advanced functions such as desktop virtualisation and integration with Cisco’s high-end TelePresence suites are also supported.

The tablet launched in Australia through Cisco a few months ago, but has a second opportunity to gain scale through the Telstra relationship unveiled last week.

In a statement issued last week, Telstra executive director Philip Jones said the tablet would assist businesses in their drive to remain better connected. “Telstra is now able to offer organisations a built-for-business tablet to keep workers connected so they can collaborate not just by email but also via IP telephony and even TelePresence away from their desk,” he said.

“Telstra’s experience and our close alliance with Cisco means organisations choosing the CIUS tablet from us can get the implementation and support they need, including management of UC applications at server level, identifying the CIUS applications relevant for their business, upgrading core systems as required, wireless LAN implementation and technical support. The CIUS Wi-Fi is the latest addition to Telstra’s Unified Communications offering and is designed to work with organisations’ latest Cisco Unified Communications platform.”

So far, Cisco has not announced any Australian customers for the Cius, although it has a number of major corporate customers who are likely to be trialling the tablet. Some of the household names which maintain Cisco unified communications infrastructure include Qantas and Westpac. A spokesperson for Telstra said the telco was currently piloting the Cius with its customers, but none had yet been announced.

Cisco’s main rival in the unified communications space, Avaya, also announced a tablet last year, but has likewise not announced any local customers. The corporate tablet market is currently dominated by the Apple iPad, despite ongoing efforts by BlackBerry maker Research in Motion to steal market share by Cupertino in the area. Telstra also markets Motorola’s Xoom to the corporate market.

opinion/analysis
Not only do I not expect Cisco’s Cius tablet to get anywhere in Australia, I expect Australian organisations to follow Jetstar’s lead over the next several years and begin actively removing physical telephony infrastructure from their workers’ desks over the next several years and deploying softphones instead.

Cisco’s promotion of the Cius will likely earn it a few early adopter customers, but I don’t expect any widespread rollouts of the tablet, except in a few specialised environments, perhaps — such as restricted environments like the Department of Defence — where the growing trend towards BYO computing will not be tolerated to the same extent as it will be in more open organisations.

In general, I would expect much of the unified computing aspect of Cisco’s offerings to undergo a radical change over the next few years. The company’s current UC business model — where organisations pay it through the nose to buy a stack of infrastructure, which their staff then use — is going to start looking quite out of date shortly.

Cisco’s new main competitor in the UC market may just be Microsoft’s purely software-based Lync platform, which I’m seeing high degrees of interest from right around Australia. At the end of the day, telephony in 2011 is just a software application … or at least, it should be.

Image credit: Cisco

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

Australia’s largest airline Qantas today announced it had appointed a new chief information officer, picking Paul Jones — who was working in the same role for Mars Incorporated.

The news — which, it appears, was broken by CIO Magazine — is the first official CIO appointment for the airline after it axed then-CIO Jamila Gordon in March 2009 after the executive had held the role for just over a year. Executive manager of Corporate Services and Technology, David Hall, who is now Jetstar CEO, acted as an interim CIO picking up Gordon’s responsibilities. At that time Hall used to describe himself as “quasi-chief information officer”.

Last year in July, NSW Department of Education and Training chief information officer Stephen Wilson was chosen to join Qantas as its head of technology, and to report to Hall. Wilson – who worked for the NSW DET deployment of the Digital Education Revolution – joined Qantas when the airline was embarking on major cost-cutting exercise within its IT support, as well as overhauling several key systems.

Seven months later from this appointment and almost two years after Gordon’s resignation, Qantas is welcoming its new CIO who will commence to work in autumn. “Qantas has appointed Paul Jones as chief information officer, commencing at the end of April,” the company said in a statement.

A Qantas spokesperson said Jones would report to Jayne Hrdlicka — group executive of strategy and technology. “Mr Jones will have overall responsibility for delivering IT solutions across the Qantas Group,” he said. “He will join Qantas from Mars Incorporated, where he is chief information officer for Global Chocolate.”

The airline spokesperson said at Mars Incorporated Jones had had experience in defining IT strategic goals, delivering IT programs and responsibility for all IT services delivered. He said Jones has expertise which would go to the benefit of Qantas. “The appointment of Mr Jones as CIO will strengthen the alignment of business strategy and technology within Qantas under Jane Hrdlicka,” he said.

Image credit: Qantas

The NSW Department of Education and Training (DET) this morning confirmed it had appointed Victorian public servant Stephen Loquet as its new chief information officer.

According to a DET spokesperson, Loquet will take up the role of CIO from 31 January, following the resignation of Stephen Wilson in June 2010, who left after five years and is currently working as head of technology at Qantas. The news was broken first by the AustralianIT this morning.

The NSW DET runs one of the largest technology support departments in Australia. According to DET official figures, the average ratio of computers to students in schools is now 1 to 6 and is expected to improve as more computers will be delivered under the Digital Education Revolution project. With a budget of $442 million the NSW and Commonwealth Government will work to maximise the distribution of laptops across schools in the state by 2012.

The spokesperson said Loquet, who is currently a senior IT executive with the Victorian Department of Education and Early Childhood, has a strong IT background and a deep understanding of the education sector.

“Stephen is well versed in the Federal Government’s Digital Education Revolution and has successfully implemented and managed major change program and has worked effectively with a broad range of stakeholders including school principals,” the DET spokesperson said.

Wilson oversaw some dramatic changes at the department during his time at the wheel.

For starters, in 2008 DET migrated its 1.5 million school students off its Microsoft Exchange email platform and onto Gmail, in one of the largest Gmail migrations globally so far. Wilson has also been involved in the rollout of the Federal Government’s Digital Education Revolution program in the state — in March he said the department was rolling out 10,000 laptops to students per week.

A lower profile rollout recently saw a massive deployment of Microsoft’s Hyper-V software to some 437 schools across NSW, in what again constituted one of the largest deployments known in Australia of the software — a rival technology to virtualisation leader VMWare.

Image credit: Rob Owen-Wahl, royalty free

feature It’s a breezy Monday afternoon in Sydney and Komatsu Australia general manager of IT Ian Harvison is talking calmly and at length about his company’s plans for its datacentre.

“The goal is that it will be shut down in two weeks,” he says.

A few years ago, such a statement would be have been laughed out of town. Shut down a datacentre? For a large industrial equipment manufacturer like Komatsu? How would the company track its assets on their journey around Australia? Provide basic IT services to its employees? Keep the telephone lines running?

A company’s datacentre, in our modern society, is its heart, pumping blood around its widely dispersed body; its nervous system, sending signals to every employee around the nation; its muscles, pushing information to suppliers and customers. And the IT department is king of that datacentre. Several years ago, Harvison would have been considered a crazy man.

But in technology — as in every other sphere of human endeavour — often it’s the crazy ideas that are actually the most logical, in another time or place. In 2010, Harvison’s approach to Komatsu’s IT assets is in fact the most rational course of action for a company which doesn’t specialise in IT services — it specialises in building construction and mining equipment.

And it makes the executive one of a new generation of Australian CIOs who are leading the drive towards sustainable forms of cloud computing in the enterprise — particularly private cloud.

Who’s doing it
When we set out several months ago to find large Australian organisations who had started to use private cloud computing services or who had started to examine business cases to do so, we didn’t have to go far.

“There is a healthy trend towards analysing the benefits of private clouds in Australia,” says John Wadeson, long-time Centrelink IT chief and now deputy secretary (ICT infrastructure) of the Department of Human Services. “A number of large organisations are either piloting or implementing private cloud solution in Australia.”

Dimension Data’s Virtual Data Centre general manager David Hanrahan points to the strong onset of private cloud in verticals where there is a strong transactional processing element — such as financial services and the banks.

Both Westpac and the Commonwealth Bank of Australia have talked publicly about their rollouts, and while not much is known about National Australia Bank’s plans, the company last month joined a global alliance of customers and vendors created by Intel to discuss cloud computing.

The rest of the private sector is also humming with cloud deployments. Qantas chief IT architect Chris Seller says the airline is in the process of virtualising its datacentre operations (run by IBM), and by 2015, it expects to be “extensively utilising cloud-based services” — with key services being targeted for cloud delivery including collaboration and messaging, IT security, application development — and “many” other back-office and line of business applications.

And Telstra has picked up several early wins, with Visy picking the telco for a wide-ranging cloud computing deal in July 2009. Having the cardboard manufacturer on board would later on in that year be one of the main driving forces between Kohmatsu picking Telstra for its own cloud migration.

“In order to remain competitive and achieve our commercial objectives in a tough economic environment, we need to change the way in which our IT resources are utilised and look at more innovative offerings around a user-pay model with our vendors, so we can share the risk and reward and allow us to grow together,” said Visy CIO Ken Major at the time.

“We now pay a monthly fee based on what we use for not only our telecommunications needs, but also our computing and storage needs so we no longer have the concern of investing in server and storage infrastructure for the future, as this is now available from Telstra as a service on demand. The capital that was earmarked for IT upgrades will now be better deployed into revenue generating assets across the business.”

Hanrahan says there’s also “quite a bit of work” emerging in education — for example, in the universities, which are often consolidating the IT resources of different faculties and departments together into shared services centres together. Curtin University of Technology outed itself in February as an early customer of Optus’ Elevate offering, which is built upon the Vblock stack promulgated by the VMware, Cisco and EMC (VCE) alliance.

“Researchers like to have the flexibility to manage their IT requirements based on a switch on, switch off basis,” said Curtin chief information officer Peter Nikoletatos when the service launched in September. “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.”

Government is also a logical one — agencies such as the Australian Taxation Office are often compared to the big banks in terms of their heavy reliance on technology. State and Federal Governments have been cautious in talking about cloud publicly, but there is no doubt there is action behind the scenes — particularly as the move towards shared services gains pace.

“We are actively deploying and building cloud infrastructure to meet our specific needs,” says John Taylor, leader of the Computation and Simulation Sciences division at the Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organisation (CSIRO).

Taylor believes private cloud will pay a particularly important role in Government. “Private clouds are likely to remain essential for government going forward due to the need for security,” he says — although as security issues are resolved, the executive says public clouds may become more attractive.

According to Joseph Sweeney, an advisor with local analyst firm Intelligent Business Research Services, the Australian organisations that are currently looking at private cloud services may vary from medium-sized companies all the way up to the giants such as the major banks. But they have one thing in common.

“It’s anyone that has a dedicated enterprise architecture role,” he says.

When an organisation is large enough to employ someone whose job it is to purely look at the internal technological roadmap going forward, that’s when certain industry-wide lessons start to creep in. Things like standards and best practices for management of architecture. Increasing use of virtualisation, and the ongoing abstraction of various hardware and software chunks.

These are all things which lead end users down the private cloud computing path — as their datacentres become increasingly virtualised, the same picture forms in each individual organisation.

Sweeney’s colleague James Turner puts it another way. For the analyst, private cloud is really just a way of labelling an organisation’s internal maturity in terms of how they’re providing services. “When it comes to private cloud, from my perspective, it means the IT department has hit a capability maturity point where it can deliver IT as a service,” he says.

How are organisations using private cloud?
When you talk to chief information officers about private cloud services and what they’re using them for, the conversation quickly turns to several key areas: Testing and development, and messaging and collaboration.

“There’s a big application in testing, a big application in development, a lesser application in production,” said Westpac group executive of technology Bob McKinnon recently, as the bank detailed its private cloud implementation.

Komatsu’s Harvison concurs on the test & dev front. He points out that under a traditional infrastructure sourcing model, his company would need to acquire servers and storage to build environments for each project. Then as a project ramped down, utilisation of the assets would sink.

“We’d still find a utilisation model, but utilisation would drop,” he says. Under a private cloud model — or, as Harvison terms his company’s contract, infrastructure as a service — the servers and storage can simply be provisioned up and down as required and billed as operational expenditure. The resources don’t sit around on an organisation’s balance sheet if they’re not being used.

Westpac has already shifted much of its testing environments into the cloud, with chief technology officer Sarv Girn pointing out that it couldn’t afford to build a complete new traditional processing environment whenever a new technology project needed to be tested.

Another area which Australian organisations are quickly moving into the cloud is their email and collaboration products — generally software such as Microsoft’s Exchange and SharePoint suites. It’s unclear whether the shift of such products into hosted environments purely constitutes what is called ‘private cloud’ (or whether they could better be described as software as a service), but there is no doubt that some of the service providers offering such outsourced environments have platforms which share most of the attributes of private cloud.

Financial services giant AMP, for example, in July revealed it would dump its Lotus Notes/Domino installation and shift to a hosted Exchange platform with CSC. Coca-Cola Amatil is undergoing a similar move to Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite, and online real estate giant REA Group has migrated its in-house staff email system to Telstra’s T-Suite platform.

However, test & dev and messaging and collaboration are generally considered ‘edge’ or non-critical services for many applications. Far more rare are the organisations which have shifted their entire production IT environments in the cloud.

When this shift comes, it tends to arrive as organisations approach the 100 percent mark in terms of virtualising their server environments.

The big shift for Kohmatsu was migrating its SAP installation off physical servers and into a fully virtualised environment with Telstra. Harvison says before the Telstra move took place, his team had virtualised “everything but SAP” internally previously.

Part of the impetus to shift, he explains, is that the actual physical servers which were running the company’s SAP platform were coming to the end of their useful life. “We actually had to make a decision about going out and buying new equipment to replenish the SAP environment, or look at something different,” he says.

It was a similar case when business support specialist Corporate Express recently took the choice to deploy Cisco’s Unified Computing System combined server and network infrastructure to create its own private cloud. The company, according to infrastructure and operations centre manager Andrew Grech, was already heading down the path towards 100 percent virtualisation — and is on track to hit that boundary before the end of this year.

When organisations reach this 100 percent mark — which IBRS would no doubt see as reflecting a relative maturity of their capability — it makes many things easier in their IT environment. Disaster recovery, backup and provisioning all become a matter of software support and changes — with the hardware mostly abstracted out of the picture.

In Kohmatsu’s case, its contract with Telstra stipulates that the telco will manage its entire environment up to and including the operating system layer in its virtualised servers — including O/S security patching and so on. Harvison’s team manages everything on top of that — the application stack.

The degree to which Harvison’s thinking has changed as his company has shifted its infrastructure out of its own datacentre is evident by the changed way he thinks about the physical servers that are actually processing Kohmatsu’s data.

“From our perspective, we don’t care what the hardware is at all,” he says — whether the servers are made by Sun, HP, IBM or whoever. “We didn’t actually talk at all with regards to the server platform,” he says of his discussions with Telstra. “At the end of the day, their relationship needs to be more with the cloud partners as opposed to the end customer.”

Harvison says although Komatsu did discuss Telstra’s virtualisation and storage platforms with the telco, in general it it’s not interested in the underlying technology beneath the services its buying — because it has “quite robust service level agreements” with the big T. “As long as Telstra delivers the SLAs … who they partner with and what they’re running on, is a Telstra-driven initiative,” he says.

Making the decision
One big question that end users will need to think about is which provider they will go with when they eventually migrate their datacentre into the cloud. Komatsu’s Harvison says that decision was the most critical thing about his company’s migration process.

Komatsu talked to three suppliers when it was making its cloud decision — HP, Telstra and Fujitsu. The company had experience working with all three in the past. Ultimately, HP declined to put in a bid for the work, and Komatsu ended up picking Telstra over Fujitsu because at that stage, Telstra’s cloud was up and running with a large existing customer — Visy.

“Instead of a proof of concept model, they had runs on the board, and they had investment in place,” says Harvison. In addition, Telstra had a different pricing model than Fujitsu was proposing.

Today, Harvison says the market is different — Fujitsu has recently formally launched its own cloud infrastructure in Australia, and other players are rapidly entering the market. But the executive says there still “aren’t that many players” in the market that have “proven solutions”.

Apart from choosing a cloud partner, Harvison says the other important thing is to make sure a supplier will stay current with the ongoing development of technology — despite the fact that you’re paying them the same amount as things progress. Komatsu has regular “technology refresh windows” where it meets with Telstra and discusses the new technology entering the market. “The last thing you want is to get stuck on old technology,” he says.

And the converse applies as well — Komatsu needs to know about any changes that are made to its underlying platform (even upgrades), so as to be able to ensure that its business applications are still supported and certified. “That’s why partnering is key — and making sure you are constantly reviewing,” he says.

Ultimately, the way that Australian CIOs are talking about private cloud in 2010 in Australia is the same way they’ve talked about any other product or service for years. It’s all about making sure the technology is aligned with the business and that good value is being gained.

The response of the CSIRO’s Taylor to the question of what he would recommend to CIOs looking at private cloud speaks volumes to this basic idea. “Establish the business case to demonstrate that their will be real benefits to the organisation,” he replies.

Just like anything else.

Image credit: BasicGov, Creative Commons

High-profile technology executive Jamila Gordon has landed on her feet after losing her position as Qantas chief information officer earlier this year, picking up the equivalent role at project management and contracting giant Leighton Holdings.

Gordon was made redundant by Qantas in March 2009, as part of an extensive restructure in the business conducted by its new chief executive officer Alan Joyce. The executive was replaced by former Jetstar executive David Hall, who has returned to lead the low cost Qantas subsidiary after a period leading Qantas’ corporate services and technology operations.

A spokesperson for Leighton said Gordon’s role was a new one. In the past, each division of Leighton — and there are many, ranging from its Leighton Contractors business to Thiess, John Holland and more — was broadly responsible for its own IT strategy.

“Gordon’s role will span the Leighton Group, and she will be working closely with the operating company chief information officers in shaping the group’s IT strategy and corporate governance, as well as overseeing and evaluating IT risk,” the company said in a statement. “In addition, Ms Gordon will work with operating company CIOs to identify areas of commonality where the Leighton Group will benefit if aggregated.”

Gordon’s role will also see her responsible for the management of IT for several discrete divisions — Leighton Holdings itself (the holding company) and the Leighton Properties group.

The executive’s role will see her working closely with at least one old friend.

When Gordon fronted the press after her appointment in Qantas — she joined the airline in 2007 — she did so in company with Qantas chief financial officer Peter Gregg. And it was Gregg that took much of the responsibility for outlining Qantas’ technology strategy during that period. The CFO left Qantas in September 2008, following Joyce’s appointment, and won a position as Leighton CFO in October 2009.

At Leighton, Gordon will report directly to Gregg — as she did at Qantas.

Not a great deal is known about Leighton’s technology operations. However, scraps of information have made their way into the public domain.

In May, for example, John Holland CIO Les Oates outed the organisation as an early adopter of Sharepoint 2010. MIS Magazine, in its profile of the company published for its MIS100 edition in July 2009, listed an early trial of Windows 7 as one of its activities, and its ERP and financial systems continued to be added to where necessary, according to the company’s general manager of Strategic IT Sean Kaye. Thiess, too, has been involved in major projects — such as a consolidation project that is seeing it centralise data from some 200 operational sites into a centralised datacentre location.

Before her role at Qantas, Gordon held a number of other senior IT positions — with IBM in Europe, for example, but also with Deloitte Consuling and GIO Insurance.

Image credit: Leighton Holdings

blog Want to use the internet on your flight on an Australian airline? That’s nice — but it’s also not yet possible, appears to be the conclusion to an extensive article on the subject published over at brand spanking new online publication Australian Business Traveller. This paragraph seems to be emblematic of the airlines’ attitude towards the subject:

A Qantas spokesperson confirmed to Australian Business Traveller that it does plan to offer internet in its A380s, though it had nothing to say at the moment about when it would be activated, or at what price. She also said Qantas had no plans to announce for internet connectivity in its other planes such as its domestic fleet.

The situation in the US, however, appears a little different:

Flying domestically in the US is an embarrassment of riches when it comes to internet access in the plane. A company called Aircell has installed EV-DO Rev. A base stations pointing at the sky on mobile towers right across continental USA. The inflight internet service is called GoGo, and aircraft from numerous airlines connect to the Aircell base stations and provide inflight internet access via WiFi at affordable rates.

Shock, horror. Once again — through no obvious reason — Australia gets left behind in the technology curve. We have planes with the facility to offer in-flight internet access and a passenger base that would happily pay for it, but airlines that can’t seem to get across the finish line.

When does Generation Y reach the management layer again?

Image credit: Qantas

Tough luck if you’re a Windows 7 fan. The nation’s largest airline Qantas yesterday announced it would go Apple-only in its frequent flyer lounges around Australia, giving travellers access to “the latest generation Macs” in a national rollout.

Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce said in a statement that the Apple desktops would be immediately available in the Qantas Club facilities and would be rolled out in other cities by the end of the year.
“We are launching Sydney Qantas Lounges with the new technology from today, Adelaide, Brisbane, Canberra, Melbourne and Perth from November and Alice Springs, Cairns, Darwin, Hobart and Townsville from December,” he said.

And it appears as if the airline’s interest in Apple also goes much further. Joyce also flagged a number of other initiatives involving the iconic technology company’s products, aimed at Qantas Club members and frequent flyers.

The company yesterday launched a new Frequent Flyer iPhone app designed to help members explore the ways they can use their points. The app allows members to track their balance, see where they’ve been earning points and work out how to use them.

The app — available for free — even uses the iPhone’s GPS features to locate Frequent Flyer partners.

“Whether members are looking to fly, stay in a hotel, eat out, go shopping or hire a car, they can find and get directions to hundreds of partners near them. And, if you have an iPhone 4 or iPhone 3GS, you can search partners, located around you, with an augmented reality view,” said Qantas Frequent Flyer chief executive Simon Hickey.

Apple’s iPad, too, has increasingly been finding traction in the executive set and in boardrooms, and Qantas subsidiary Jetstar has plans to start a rollout of the tablet devices for entertainment purposes in planes by the end of the year — at a reported rental cost of $10 per iPad per flight.

Image credit: Apple

Chris Seller is Qantas’ chief IT architect and head of Operations for its Corporate Services and Technology division. The executive is a veteran of the airline — having held senior IT roles within its ranks for over a decade, including as the head of IT for its Jetstar subsidiary. Seller took some time out recently to speak about Qantas’ cloud computing strategy and the issue in general.

What is your definition of private cloud?

Private Cloud services are an evolution of the datacentre virtualisation technology developments that have occurred over the past five years and offer higher levels of security, reliability and customisation for critical business systems using private networks. These environments deliver some of the benefits of public cloud computing without the potential risks, capitalising on data security, reliability, and corporate oversight concerns.

Do you think the current hype is justified?

The various models of cloud services offer many advantages – it really depends on the business situation. In many ways the airline systems provided by Amadeus can be considered a “Community Cloud” providing reservations, inventory, departure control and other software services for many of the world’s major airlines. This has been a very successful computing services model for many years. Qantas has been heavily involved in the development of these services and is an early adopter of many of the new innovations in airline passenger management delivered by this computing services model.

What do you think of the current industry trends towards private cloud?

Private clouds offer many of the benefits of cloud computing such as increased utilisation, elastic capacity, rapid dynamic provisioning of environments and device- and location-independent access while mitigating some of the risks. Private clouds offer increased data security, reliability, and corporate oversight while reducing potential network latency issues associated with network access integrations – effectively mitigating many of the concerns enterprises have with delegating their computing needs to external multi-tenanted environments.

The downside is you still have to acquire, design, build, and manage the infrastructure, which reduces the potential savings on capital costs and support — essentially eliminating the economic benefits that makes public cloud computing a compelling concept.

What is Qantas/Jetstar working on at the moment?

At Qantas, we currently use the Microsoft BPOS cloud and another platform in the US for some simple document management applications and some of our business areas have been experimenting with Google Apps and Salesforce.com.

Qantas are also in the process of virtualising our own datacentre operations run by IBM. We are starting to see some real benefits in terms of lower costs (support and environmentals), higher infrastructure utilisation, and reduced implementation timeframes.

What solutions are you looking at in the future? Any cloud-based plans involved?

We see the continued progression of our online services to the cloud. Currently our online booking services are provided through Amadeus, site caching services are provided through the cloud-based Akamai Service, and many other elements are hosted “externally” or in the cloud. New investments such as an integration hub for partner airlines is being proposed as a cloud-based service.

By 2015, Qantas expects to be extensively utilising cloud-based services and we continue to grow the footprint. Key services that are being targeted for cloud delivery may include collaboration and messaging services, information technology security services such as scanning and intrusion prevention services, application development hosting, and many back office and line of business applications could be procured in a Software as a Service model.

Do you think Australia has a unique need for private cloud computing?

The market for domestic public cloud offerings in Australia is still developing. Many of the larger and more useful offerings are based offshore and this introduces data security and network latency concerns. Until there is a greater local presence for some of these public cloud services I think many Australian enterprises will look towards private cloud solutions in partnership with local IT service providers as a first step into the cloud.

What benefits do you see in private cloud?

Cloud computing offers Qantas the potential to reduce our spend on technology infrastructure, reduce time to market for new business systems, and provide elastic capacity to cater for the turbulent nature of the airline industry (i.e. scale up and down as required).

There is the potential to have an on-demand service, which would benefit us in periods of peaks and troughs. There is hope that in a cloud scenario we can do this without the need to buy extra services. This will reduce our fixed computing overhead costs, provide the opportunity for faster to market capacity, and will enable long-term forecasts on needs.

Are you concerned about any security issues related to private cloud?

We have concerns about the security of public cloud services due to the issues around trans-national security concerns. There are some significant security, privacy and technology limitations with the current generation of offshore public cloud computing solutions.

The global nature of these service means the data could be stored in a variety of locations – we don’t want our customer data compromised if it ends up in a jurisdiction with poor privacy laws or government access rights that are not consistent with our obligations to protect our customers’ privacy. Most of these potential security and privacy issues found in public clouds are mitigated in the private model.

What restrictions/hurdles do you see for private cloud in Australia (for example, power restrictions)?

There is a growing concern around the ability for datacentres to continue to grow due to power constraints. Multi-tenanted cloud services can create opportunities to increase the utilisation of datacentre infrastructure and reduce the overall power needs.

Network capacity and latency can also be a limiting factor for cloud services. Moving large volumes of data necessitated by integrations with other systems and network access latency can drive significant costs.

Which Australian sectors do you think would uptake private cloud first?

I think this is more dependent on the individual enterprise than a particular sector. The decision to deploy private cloud services will depend very much on the particular enterprise’s IT infrastructure and application needs, their sourcing strategy and investment cycle. In Qantas’ case we are in the process of virtualising our entire datacentre operations, which now presents us with some new and innovative hosting opportunities in our own private cloud.

What type of private cloud services do you do you think are uptaken first?

Commoditised services such as messaging, collaboration document management, and many of the simpler back office business applications.

What would you recommend to an Australian CIO looking at private cloud?

Firstly, understand the model and what tradeoffs and limitations a cloud service entails. Managing in a multi-tenanted environment requires a more careful approach to change and configuration management for instance. There are also potential software licensing and support issues to be considered. Secondly, understand the information security and privacy implications of the data to be stored in the cloud. Can you fulfil your corporate data security and customer privacy obligations when it’s all in a cloud environment?

Finally, try it out with some commodity services like messaging and collaboration. Then introduce some less critical line of business applications and monitor system performance, stability and network latency.

This article is one in a series about private cloud in the Australian context. Other feature articles so far include an article investigating the definition of private cloud, and an article looking at the variety of private cloud providers in Australia. Westpac has also recently revealed it has deployed an internal private cloud.

Top image credit: Qantas

IT services giant Unisys has confirmed it has won a lengthy deal to provide new baggage tracking systems for Qantas, after the pair’s relationship in a trial system was outed by the airline in July.

The system is part of what Qantas is calling its ‘Next-Generation’ check-in platform, made up of technology from 15 different vendors and involving the use of radio frequency identification tagging – RFID chips. Globally, airlines have long signalled the use of the chips attached to luggage as being the nirvana of baggage tracking, as the chips themselves can easily broadcast origin and destination information.

Under Unisys’ four-year deal with Qantas – revealed in a statement this morning – the IT services company will provide systems integration, implementation and rollout services to Qantas to support the Baggage Reconciliation System, as well as application hosting and support at Unisys’ Sydney datacentre.

The first stage of the rollout will see Qantas customers able to print out their bag tags (consisting of a barcade) at check-in kiosks before dropping off their bags. Qantas’ staff will then scan the barcodes to link the bags to passengers’ flight information. Passengers will also be able to purchase additional baggage allowances online at home – or when checking them in as usual.

However, perhaps the more exciting part of the rollout for technologists will be the rollout of what Qantas is calling its Q Bag Tag – a RFID chip which will be given to Platinum, Gold and Silver Qantas Frequent Flyer members. These passengers will be able to attach the chip to their bags instead of the barcode bag tag.

Qantas’ Next-Generation revamp also involves a number of other vendors – such as Fujitsu, Amadeus, Telstra and Satyam.

Unisys is hardly new to this kind of technology. In June 2009 it inked a five-year, $25 million contract renewal with the Board of Airline Representatives in Australia, which represents some 44 international airlines in Australia.

The IT services company is providing network and security infrastructure as well as help desk support for BARA’s own baggage reconciliation system, which also uses a barcode.

In addition, its new deal with Unisys may also give the IT services giant some satisfaction for another reason. In May 2009, the company lost out to rival Fujitsu in an extensive, $200 million contract to support the airline’s desktops. Fujitsu is also involved in Qantas’ Next-Generation overhaul – but, according to reports, its role may be more minimal, supplying handheld scanners and other peripherals to the project.

Image credit: Qantas