news The nation’s number two telco Optus has released a clutch of National Broadband Network pricing plans aimed at small businesses, and has also revealed it will expand its consumer broadband plans in March, adding more bundles and 24 month contracts.

The company released its first tranche of consumer NBN pricing in November last year, with the plans being favourably compared to its current ADSL and HFC cable broadband pricing. The NBN plans are virtually identical to Optus’ current consumer broadband pricing.

The small business broadband plans released today come at six different levels ranging from $59 per month up to $129 base cost, depending on whether you purchase a bundled home phone line, and how much download quota you need per month (from 100GB up to a terabyte). They feature basic broadband speeds of 25Mbps, which is one of the NBN’s equivalent speed tiers to today’s ADSL broadband, but customers can boost the speeds of their Optus broadband connections in tiers, for $5, $10 or $20 per month. $20 extra per month, for example, will get you 100Mbps speeds on an NBN connection.

The other major ISP to have released NBN business plans is iiNet. In some areas, Optus’ plans are dramatically cheaper than those of iiNet. For example, an iiNet business NBN plan with 40GB of quota and speeds of 25Mbps will cost customers $84.95 a month. However, Optus has a 100GB plan with the same speeds for just $59 per month. At the top end, the two ISPs are more comparable — for example, a terabyte plan at 100Mbps will cost Optus SME customers $139 per month, and iiNet customers $129.95 per month.

Customers can sign up to either 12 month or 24 month contracts on the plan. The plans will come with what Optus is describing as its ‘NBN Wi-Fi modem’, although it did not clarify what brand or model that modem would be.

The packages also come with a package which Optus dubs its ‘OfficeApps’ email and collaboration licence. The package bundles Google’s software as a service Apps office suite together with the ability for small businesses to register their own domain name and associate it with their email account, and a bulk SMS package called ‘webSMS’.

As with its consumer NBN broadband plans, Optus’ new small business NBN plans are very similar to its existing ADSL/HFC cable broadband plans. For example, the company offers naked (without a phone line) business broadband packages ranging from $49 a month with 10GB of data, to $119 per month with a terabyte of data. The $59, $89 and $119 price points are virtually identical with those price points in Optus’ NBN business plans. And the same is true of its bundled offerings.

In a statement issued by Optus this morning, Rohan Ganeson, Managing Director for Optus SMB said: “The NBN opens the door for small businesses to take advantage of high speed broadband to do business in new ways, and make use of the latest digital tools to be more efficient and competitive. When you consider that 48 per cent of Australian SMBs don’t have a website and only four per cent are using cloud solutions such as web-hosted email, there is a huge opportunity for small businesses to embrace digital technologies.

“Optus NBN packages have been designed to offer great flexibility and value and make it easier for smallbusinesses to take the leap into the digital world, from establishing an online presence to reach new customers,to running their applications in the cloud for 24/7 access to business data. We’ve also combined OfficeApps with our NBN offerings for the first time to give small businesses that competitive edge and help lower their operating costs.”

“This is the first of many NBN packages Optus will offer to help small businesses make the most of the NBN to enhance and grow their business,” Mr Ganeson said. “As the roll-out progresses, we’ll expand our NBN packages to cater for larger offices and add more Optus OfficeApps inclusions to help businesses run their operations faster and smarter.”

The telco also noted that in March it was planning to expand its range of consumer broadband and home phone bundles and introduce 24 month contract plans.

opinion/analysis
Once again we see that Optus has launched a range of NBN plans which are virtually identical to its existing offerings in ADSL/HFC cable broadband, lending further credence to the idea that broadband prices will not be higher under the National Broadband Network.

Last week, I wrote on Delimiter that it was “factually inaccurate” for the Coalition to continue to claim that broadband prices would be higher under the National Broadband Network. The Office of Shadow Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull has so far not responded to an invitation to comment on this issue. However, I would suggest that the release of Optus’ small business plans this morning is another nail in the coffin of that claim.

How long will it be until Turnbull and others within the Coalition admit they were wrong on this issue, or provide some evidence for their claims?

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

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

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

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

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

Features of iiNet Business Cloud include:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maverick entrepreneur Peter Kazacos (pictured) is once more directly in control of a mid-sized technology services company in Australia, with local listed player Anittel noting this morning the executive would add the managing director role to his existing chairman duties, following the immediate departure of incumbent Ilkka Tales.

Tales was appointed chief executive of Anittel — formerly Hostech — in March last year, and has led the company through an intense period of acquisitions and growth that has also resulted in financial and headcount expansion — from $6 million in annual revenue to $60 million, and from 20 staff to 190 today.

The executive was previously well known as the chief executive of internet telephony provider Engin, which is now part of the Seven Network — as well as having held senior positions at a number of other companies, such as Telstra and Phillios Communications. He is also chairman of MoGeneration — a local iPhone application development house.

But in a statement issued this morning, Anittel — which focuses on the small to medium business market — revealed Tales would step down “immediately”, with chairman Kazacos to step into the managing director role.

“Anittel has made significant changes to its operational structure, management and board make-up since revising its profit forecast in December 2010. This leadership change is the culmination of a strategic shift to organic growth and a reinvigorated focus on recurring revenue streams,” said the company in a statement thanks Tales for his service and noting he would remain as a director of its board.

For his part, Kazacos — well known for founding the large KAZ IT services business and selling it to Telstra in 2004, as well as his role in founding Anittel — said the company was now “fully geared” to capitalise on organic growth opportunities in the coming 12 months.

“Without ruling out future acquisition opportunities, we will now ramp up the marketing of our managed IT and telecommunications services, whilst maintaining a tight reign on expenditure,” he said. “I remain committed to our growth in regional Australia with local expertise and support services, and am confident that our offer will continue to enjoy broad acceptance.”

Image credit: Anittel

Local hosting and domain name specialist Netregistry has backed the Gerry Harvey-fronted push for a level tax playing field between Australian and international retailers, saying the issue was affecting its massive local small to medium business customer base.

The issue blew up shortly after Christmas, with a number of local retail giants such as Harvey Norman, Angus & Robertson, David Jones, Just Jeans, Myer and more — publishing an open letter demanding a “fair go” in the retail sector, pointing out that international retailers weren’t forced to collect the 10 percent GST on purchases under $1,000, or pay for stamp duty.

Since that time, Harvey himself has appeared to back down slightly from the push, facing strong internet criticism with regards to the issue. However, other organisations have come out of the woodwork to support the retailers on the issue — with the latest today being NetRegistry.

“Australian consumers need to understand this exemption in the context of the survival of tens of thousands of small businesses owned and staffed by their friends and families,” said Netregistry chief executive Larry Bloch (pictured above), in a statement issued this afternoon.

“The Australian Government refusing to take timely action on their behalf is yet another indictment of a Government that fails to support the millions of Australians who are dependent on small businesses for their future — as owners, spouses, family or staff in the over 1 million small businesses in Australia.”

Bloch claimed that while small retailers had taken advantage of the internet in Australia, they were disadvantaged by the disparity in price, compared with overseas rivals — which he said was “a direct result of the unequal Australian tax regime”. The internet executive said the issue wasn’t about the profits of large retailers — but about “the basic fairness of our tax policies towards decent, everyday Australians” — who, he said, were trying to have a fair go, without asking for anything from anyone.

In a separate opinion piece on the matter published today on the website of Nett Magazine — which Netregistry owns — Bloch said the retailers’ campaign message had been “crafted badly” and “atrociously delivered”.

“But despite this failing, the underlying issue is serious and deserves careful consideration. It is not about large retailers being under threat but rather the reality that vast masses of Australian Small Businesses exposed to this particular inequity may well suffer far more than the big end of town as their livelihood is at stake,” wrote Bloch.

In its open letter, the so-called Retail Coalition didn’t demand that the tax be levied against international retailers as well as the locals. Instead, it said there were two options to create what it described as “a level playing field”: Either everyone could be taxed, or the exemption enjoyed by the foreign players could be extended locally.

Image credit: Netregistry

Australia’s peak technology industry group has published a strongly worded rejection of a controversial blog post by a senior Gartner analyst, arguing it needed to correct a number of “misrepresentations” and “enlighten” the researcher as to the group’s true intentions with respect to intellectual property rights in government.

In mid-December, Gartner research vice president Brian Prentice — one of the group’s most senior Australian researchers — slammed the Australian Information Industry Association’s policy on suppliers maintaining IP rights in government contracts, which it had successfully convinced the NSW State Government to adopt.

“This is bad policy. It is far from best practice. It is not in the best interests of citizens. It will not help the local IT industry as a whole,” wrote Prentice at the time, arguing the group was self-interested and largely represented multinationals like Google, Intel and Microsoft.

However, in a follow-up posting published on Prentice’s blog yesterday, AIIA chief executive Ian Birks said he needed to “directly counter some of the misrepresentations provided in your blog piece” and also “enlighten” the analyst on a broader view of what Prentice had described as bad policy.

Firstly, Birks pointed out, over 75 percent of the AIIA’s 400 company members were Australian small or medium enterprises (SMEs), and had six Australian ICT representatives on its board. Each member had one vote no matter its size, he said, and so the fact that its board was largely composed of multinational companies represented democracy.

Birks also claimed the AIIA took its role representing local SMEs very seriously.

He noted that of the 12 major contract outcomes which featured in the group’s recent negotiations with the NSW Government, a number were specifically focused on benefits for SMEs — such as limitation of liability changes.

“Furthermore, the primary motivator for the push from AIIA to address the treatment of IP in Government contracts is not — as you suggest in your blog — a move specifically motivated to help multinational ICT firms, but much rather a move designed to all industry, and most significantly assist SMEs that are doing business with government,” he added.

“In truth, the freeing up of IP on a specific piece of Government business is highly unlikely to be a make or break issue for a multinational as their ICT business models are varied and diverse,” he said. “But I am aware of specific situations where it has directly assisted local SMEs stay in business or considerably enhance their business by being able to further promote IP they have developed in one government contract into other government business elsewhere.”

In general, Birks wrote, Prentice seemed to have “skipped” the “fundamental point” that all Australian governments wanted to support the local ICT industry, and it was “progressive” of them to recognise that IP rights were more sensibly held by suppliers, as government was not in the business of commercialising IP.

And — although he welcomed the input from Gartner — Birks also took one more stab at Prentice in his post, wondering how often Gartner analysts actually spoke with local industry SMEs when forming their research positions.

“How many SME customers do Gartner have?” he asked.

Image credit: Shirley Booth, royalty free

How many times have you set your alarm for the early hours of the morning so you could watch the show live as that technological prankster Steve Jobs pulls yet another marvel out of his hat, after uttering the magic words: “And now, just one more thing”?

If you’re like most Australian technology enthusiasts, it’s gotten to be a regular event. You’re looking forward to a new iPhone, a new iPod, a new MacBook, a new iMac — or these days, you’re even looking forward to a new iPad.

Those who work in Australia’s corporate IT departments aren’t immune to the phenomenon — Apple’s sparkly new baubles are going to be the talk of the town at morning coffee at work anyway — so you have to know what’s going on.

And yet rarely does Jobs reveal much of anything that’s really that interesting to IT managers. Apart from the odd sporadic confirmation of support for a feature like Microsoft Exchange that is clearly aimed at the enterprise, or an update of its Xserve server line, Apple’s products are usually aimed squarely at the consumer.

This situation and other issues has left Apple out in the cold when it comes to the corporate and government sectors. And yet, anecdotally Australian chief information officers will admit they regularly get requests from staff for Macs on their desktops. Despite lacklustre interest from Apple itself, demand exists from users. So what does the future hold for Apple in the enterprise?

State of play
The latest figures show Apple is rapidly growing its share of the Australian overall desktop PC market. In late January, the company revealed it had boosted its Macintosh sales in Australia by 70 percent year-on-year. Australian statistics from analyst firm IDC showed Apple’s share of new PCs being shipped (including enterprise and consumer) as of September 2009 — the most recent period accounted for — was approximately 7 percent.

Australians bought just under 1.2 million units in the period (including corporate and consumer sales), which would place total Apple unit shipments in that quarter at approximately 84,000. Analysts attribute Apple’s growing consumer market share to a number of factors, including the halo effect from its iPod and iPhone lines, its strong security and stability story, and even the quality of its hardware build.

You only have to walk into an official Apple store to be able to see the buzz around the company’s consumer offerings. It’s audible.

It’s also easy to find large and small organisations that have Macs embedded throughout their operations. Tier two banking and insurance giant Suncorp runs some Macs in its operations. Chief information officer Jeff Smith says the bank has them “in spots”.

“We do use them as there are certain things we can do better on a Mac, like with user interface development and usability,” he says. “They are invariably easier to manage and more secure.” Smith says this is an important factor when you consider the amount of money that businesses pay to secure their infrastructure.

There’s also the deal that may well have been Apple’s largest coup in the Australian enterprise — half a decade ago the NSW Roads and Traffic Authority (RTA) deployed 1200 Apple G4 iMacs in registry offices across the state.

Chilli Chocolate Marketing consultant Simon Garlick says when he first helped to start the marketing and communications agency, from day one he imposed a “Mac only” company IT policy. “I don’t have time to play IT guy making sure people have security patches installed, that they’re not using some security nightmare browser (that is, IE), that antivirus apps are updated, and so on and so on — but I don’t have budget to hire IT guys,” he says.

“Yeah, it sounds like a marketing campaign, and it is, but it’s true. You turn a Mac on and it works. No DLL hassles, no driver issues, and NO CRASHES. We all have iPhones, the office has Airport Wi-Fi access points, everything works seamlessly together.”

Then there’s the education sector, one of Apple’s traditional strengths. In February this year, the vendor published an extensive case study about a University of Newcastle rollout that saw the educational institution’s School of Design, Communication & Information Technology move its entire laboratory hardware infrastructure across to Apple, although students can still run Windows on the machines for some applications.

However, the obvious rejoinder to all of these examples is that they play to Apple’s traditional strengths in the design and education communities. It’s clear that Apple’s share of the market is higher in these sectors and in the consumer space than it is in the mainstream enterprise, where it continues largely to be left out of the mega-deals that vendors like HP and Dell enjoy.

Apple’s problem
We hate to pull out the Gartner magic quadrant here. But sometimes its necessary to do just that. In an October 2009 report, the analyst firm gave Apple the worst rating out of all the major vendors — ranking the company below Acer, Fujitsu, Lenovo and market leaders HP and Dell — when it comes to the mainstream enterprise desktop.

Gartner said that Apple’s enterprise problems are that it lacks global service, sales and support capabilities focused on the enterprise.

“Apple doesn’t focus on large and mid-size customers, and hasn’t made significant investments in the sales and support necessary to serve them,” Gartner said in a separate note specifically on the vendor earlier in 2009.

Longhaus research director Sam Higgins says he doesn’t see Macs often being purchased in bulk by enterprises as part of the sort of corporate rollouts that Dell and HP enjoy. Apple has a “false shadow” in the enterprise sector in that there is a lot of talk about the vendor in big business because of its strong consumer presence. “But the shadow is exactly that — a shadow,” he says.

The problem is no longer that Mac OS X doesn’t support the same breadth of desktop software that Windows does — after all, Macs can run Windows natively via Apple’s Boot Camp tool, or in virtualised environments through software like Parallels.

The problem, for Higgins, is that the breadth of software tools for managing a bulk number of Apple desktops isn’t as wide as in the Windows space. So while Macs may creep in around the enterprise edges — particularly when special users like CEOs demand them — the analyst says it’s hard to give them “full citizenship” in terms of being integrated with organisations’ desktop standard operating environments.

“It’s the English as a second language problem,” he says.

Higgins points to the success of Research in Motion’s BlackBerry device in the enterprise as a comparison, noting the sophisticated management tools available for the device. Windows laptops also, he says, have security tools to deal with cases of theft. “The difficulty with anything in the enterprise is manageability and governance,” he says.

IBRS analyst Joe Sweeney says his group has seen very little uptake of Macs in Australia’s large to medium enterprises. In terms or larger organisations and the public sector, he says “by far the biggest issue,” for IT managers in thinking about their corporate desktop PCs he says, is determining how they will manage the upgrade to Windows 7 — whether they will choose the traditional PC, or look at desktop or application virtualisation solutions.

Even Apple’s education sector advantage is eroding, with Sweeney pointing out the Federal Government’s Digital Education Revolution initiative was further entrenching Windows in schools.

The opportunity
To a certain extent, the problems and state of play regarding Apple Macs in the Australian enterprise have been the same for some time. But everyone Delimiter spoke to for this article agreed several factors were set to change that dynamic.

Firstly, there is broad agreement that employees are increasingly demanding the ability to bring their own technology into Australian enterprises — and that technology is increasingly Apple-flavoured.

Mortgage Choice chief information officer Neil Rose-Innes says the group used to set a standard for desktop and laptop machines that its staff and franchisees could use the company’s corporate applications on.

Now it’s moving towards a much simpler minimum configuration that reflects the fact that users want choice on their desktops, and they often don’t want a separate desktop, laptop, netbook or even smartphone for business and work. They want to bring their device in.

“My personal view is that there’s legs on it,” he says of the Mac.

Higgins says CIOs are handing users the budget for their desktop or laptop and allowing them to purchase it themselves. He gives the example of a user who might want to buy a high-end Alienware gaming laptop to use as their corporate and home machine — contributing some money themselves, perhaps through a salary sacrifice arrangement, and using some of the corporation’s IT spend.

“It’s like bringing your own car,” he says, noting most organisations don’t operate their own corporate motor fleet any more. “There’s a whole stack of psychological staff and employment benefits that can come from operating those kind of things.”

The change in technology that is facilitating this change in approach is the corporate migration to web-based applications such as Salesforce.com that don’t require software to be installed on a users’ desktop but are accessed through a web browser.

Mortgage Choice, for example last year switched its corporate email platform from Lotus Notes to Google’s GMail — which is as fully functional on a Mac as it is on a PC, and is accessed through a web browser.

Interest in cloud email platforms in particular from Australian organisations is running high, following significant deployments in the education sector.

“With more applications being delivered via the web, your choice of operating system is far less important anyway,” says technology journalist and commentator Stilgherrian — who says in his days supporting small business in IT that Mac users generate far fewer support calls than Windows users.

The interest in the web platform is also reflected in the number of corporations that are deploying smartphones — and their increasingly mature capability of accessing the web on the road. One of the leading smartphone platforms is Apple’s iPhone.

“For the iPhone 70 percent of the Fortune 100 companies in the US are either deploying or currently testing the iPhone. 50% of the Financial Times 100 are doing the same thing.

Apple chief operating officer Tim Cook said at a Goldman Sachs conference in the US recently that 70 percent of Fortune 100 companies in the US are “either deploying or testing the iPhone”. “50 percent of the Financial Times 100 are doing the same thing,” he said. And Apple is keen to get that message out.

Some believe the “halo” effect of the iPhone will have an effect upon enterprise Mac sales the same way the iPod did in the consumer space several years ago.

Ultimately, with demand from users balanced against the challenges of running a corporate IT department, the future of Apple Macs in the enterprise is still too close to call. But it’s fitting to leave this article with sentiments from a CIO — a class of buyer who will help to make that decision.

“I think it will take a little bit of time,” says Suncorp’s Jeff Smith. “But the reality is it is a productive environment for people. I think it will have a growing space. I think the leading indicator is the consumer area and market shares have been growing big time and that is going to flow into the business area.”

Image credits: Shane Fullwood (CC2.0), Acaben, CC 2.0 and Gartner

The problems small and medium sized Australian companies face in winning Commonwealth IT contracts are as perennial as the grass. Two and a half years into a three year term and the Rudd Government solution is the appointment of a “respected industry figure” to “provide leadership.”

Full story by James Riley at ITWire