Expand Networks, providers of airborne secure remote access to US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the Joint Forces Command, has substantially upped its antipodean presence aiming to gain a substantial foothold in defence, government and corporate sectors.
The Department of Defence will transfer manual processing of 600,000 paper invoices a year over to a $2.6 million scanner-fed, optical character recognition (OCR) system as part of an ongoing automation of its accounts payable systems.
Australia's 600-pound telco Telstra is in the midst of its biggest security shake up in more than a decade, and is understood to have appointed a new group manager for security across the whole enterprise. It is also advertising for no fewer than 10 senior and executive security positions.
Only two years after publicly hugging a Microsoft executive live on stage in Sydney, Sun Microsystems' chief technology evangelist Simon Phipps has branded opponents of open source as "luddites" and predicted current proprietary vendor dominance will crumble through the sheer collective will of a new generation of IT managers.
Due to considerable reader feedback, questions and conflicting media reports about the Australian Taxation Office's stand on issues ranging from offshoring to open source deployments, the following is an edited version of an interview between the Australian Taxation Office's CIO, Bill Gibson and Computerworld's Julian Bajkowski on Tuesday March 16 2004.
The federal court has thrown out a long-running claim for $30 million in redundancy entitlements by former IT staff of the Commonwealth Bank whose jobs were transferred over to EDS when the bank outsourced all its IT services in 1997.
IT managers fretting over job security because of the inflated predictions of boom and bust by analysts and recruiters can take heart in data that reveals the number of IT managers in Australia has remained stable if not static for at least three years.
In what has been a clearly testing week, Australian Taxation Office CIO Bill Gibson has spelled out his vision for Australia's single largest revenue raiser and scotched allegations that the Tax Office is set to move its applications code shop to India.
In the six months since the spectacular exit of Richard Alston as IT and communications minister and his replacement by Daryl Williams QC, much has quietly changed in the way those who hold power in the federal sphere view public sector information technology and particularly outsourcing.
In the blaze of criticism surrounding Telstra’s ambition to become a media player, those accusing our hamstrung national carrier of losing the plot have managed to avoid a key question: what precisely is Telstra meant to do when its telephony revenues dry up?
IT buyers hoping for a price cut for sexy, slimline, flat-screen LCD monitors look set to wait another 18 months as supplies of 15in LCD monitors run short and OEM vendors scramble to pick up over-priced crumbs from LCD panel manufacturers' factories, according to the worldwide president of hardware manufacturer Acer, JT Wang.
IT needs to be upfront about costs, speak in plain English and be prepared to deliver reality rather than promises to both users and suppliers to secure the budget they want.
The federal government has moved decisively to centralise control of its ICT expenditure, architecture and execution across all agencies and will appoint an Australian government chief information officer (AGCIO) to oversee whole of government ICT coordination, backed by a new specialist office to oversee the development and promotion of its own ICT agenda.
Five government agencies have been told to develop performance measures for their Internet offerings after their Web sites were declared rudderless ships floating aimlessly on a sea of taxpayer's money, according to the findings Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) report.
After a small avalanche of statements and some technical detail at the recent RSA Security conference in San Francisco, Microsoft's bowling-shirted evangelical Security Summit promotional roadshow paid a whistlestop visit to Australia last week.