Google continued to push a plethora of products and services into the market in 2009 furthering a sprawl of branded technology with seemingly little strategy. Evidenced by a portfolio that now includes an e-book, Chrome, Android, GTalk, Wave, Gmail, Earth, Maps, EPay, Picassa, cloud data centres, a pending notebook, tablet, social networking and of course advertising and search, the US giant is exhibiting the classic behaviours of an alternative free and open source vendor (FOSS) struggling against proprietary monopolies to establish a beach-head within the technology stack.

When it comes to headlines, few topics beyond the National Broadband Network (NBN) receive as much interest as the plight of Australia’ eHealth agenda. Whether it is questioning the value of five years of public monies invested into the National E-Health Transition Authority, privacy concerns about a single Unique Healthcare Identifier (UHI), or the estimated $1.9 billion of funding needed to get there as proposed by the National Health and Hospitals Reform Commission in mid-2009, the eHealth agenda impacts the lives of many CIOs and their suppliers.

In the early 1990’s, when the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) v1 emerged as the defacto global standard for best practice ICT service management, large government and corporate organisations rushed to improve service levels and increase control by major investments in help desk, incident and problem management solutions. In Australia, those firms that did not invest prior to 2000 in the first ITIL adoption wave were subsequently spurred on by the release of ITIL v2 in 2001. Today, Service Desk or Service Centre solutions are a key part of the CIO’s application portfolio as demonstrated by the Longhaus’ 2009 ICT Spending Priorities Study that found 32% of medium to large Australian enterprises had adopted these types of software solutions.

Despite the nervous reactions by global markets to recent comments by UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown or United States President Barack Obama regarding regulatory reform of the global financial system, major software vendors continue to make acquisitions and invest in solutions targeting governance, risk and compliance (GRC). IBM’s acquisition of Guardium, RSA and EMC’s Security Division acquisition of Kansas-based Archer Technologies all provide clear examples in the last three months alone.

The advent of SaaS offerings and re-packaging of enterprise systems for the mid-market is creating an environment where organisations of any scale can execute almost identical business processes. While providing advantages to smaller businesses by allowing them to achieve the outcomes of much larger organisations on an incremental cost basis, it also exposes smaller firms to the increasing likelihood of regulation and compliance requirements.