It seemed that just about every month last year another story would appear in the media about an account that IBM lost to Microsoft on the basis of a Notes-Exchange migration with  Defence, and Qantas being some of the bigger names revealing plans to migrate away from the darling of Email 1.0 over the last few years. Aside from these organisations it has happened with such regularity and on such a scale that many casual business observers must be scratching their heads at the misfortune of Lotus and believing this to be just an example of how empires fall. Our own research report entitled The Australian Enterprise Email Market received its fair share of press.

A key promise and message from many vendors within the ICT industry when it comes to adopting Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) from within the cloud is the ability to access additional capacity from a selection of cloud suppliers. This style of implementation is often referred to as “hybrid cloud” where IaaS-based capacity is both internally and externally provided.

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.