Only a week after Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer hit Australian shores to appease twitchy customers, IBM has jetted in its chief Linux salesman John Vitkus in a concerted effort to open the hearts, minds and wallets of Australian banks and financial institutions to penguin-flavoured solutions.
Let it not be said that vendors resort to wild claims in an attempt to drum up business. At least not the level-headed folks at StorageTek who have boldly predicted that the sheer volume of data - and hence demand for intelligent storage solutions - as opposed to space, will literally explode come 2007.
Former US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency Information Science and Technology panel (DARPA) (ISAT) chairman Stephen Cross has been announced as the keynote speaker at the 9th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference to be held on Queensland's Gold Coast from December 4 to 6.
CIOs and IT departments find themselves in the slow lane, bypassed by vendors racing to capture new sales in a market where IT sales remain subdued.
The current tough times of IT are forcing an unusual consensus of common sense among vendors performing in the Web services show, but will it last?
It's not everyday one sees the likes of Steve Wozniak, John Draper (aka Captain Crunch) and Kevin Mitnick all sitting down around a table to reminisce about the good old days of hacking, but that's precisely what SBS is dishing up on Saturday October 19 at 7.30pm in the form documentary retrospective on the forgotten roots of hacking.
AMP CIO Warwick Foster has been sacked in a boardroom decapitation festival following the company's ruthless punishment by shareholders over poor financial performance and market concerns over the company disclosure processes.
The Federal Government has moved to dramatically recentralise its IT investment policy with the launch of a new 'federated' structure to oversee and coordinate ICT investment and governance (ICTIG) for the whole of government.
Three weeks is a long time in the banking world, especially when the sun is shining and the surf is up. In a low-key changing of the guard Nigel Smyth has been appointed CIO at Macquarie Bank, replacing Ian Graham who has, at least according to his former employer, taken up life as a waxhead, replete with a brand new surfboard under his arm as a parting gift.
Faint signs of an IT spending lift are emerging from the Australian manufacturing sector. Powered along by robust domestic consumer spending and a near-maniacal housing market, some manufacturing companies appear to be in a situation which sees them with some cash to reinvest in their businesses and aged or nearly redundant ERP and supply chain management systems.
Companies able to hire IT staff in the current technology market climate face new challenges as both candidates and recruitment firms swamp employers who advertise.
Executives who blame poor IT performance and cost blow-outs on CRM and the IT departments got a pasting from a leading advertising and marketing executive last week.
Insourcing end-user support services - moving them back in-house -- is gaining momentum as IT managers struggle to maintain costs and vendors slash headcounts.