Genesis Energy has signed a five year IT managed services contract with Dimension Data, replacing Gen-i as its outsource provider.
The contract includes Dimension Data’s support service (Uptime) and service management offering (Insite) for the energy retailer’s nationwide corporate IT environment.
The ANZ media table market doubled in Q2 2011, says IDC. The growth was driven by multiple launches of Android-based devices and the researchers say these will soon be joined by other players such as the recently announced Amazon Kindle Fire.
According to IDC’s “ANZ Quarterly Media Tablet and eReader Tracker (2011, Q2)”, 420,000 tablets shipped in this period. Australia contributed to 87.5 percent of the total shipments.
“The market expansion was a combined effort of early adopters refreshing devices purchased last year and new users who were interested in a media tablet as a complementary device, with some waiting for more non-Apple variety,” says Yee-Kuan Lau, market analyst for IDC ANZ. “That said, there is still strong demand for Apple's iPad 2 since its launch at the end of March.
“The supply-side push from the new Android players in the market, particularly amongst the traditional PC hardware vendors, has caused a large rollout of stock into national retailers to strengthen their brand presence. However, at this stage, most vendors were testing the initial market response by introducing WiFi-only models.”
Apple iPad’s market share declined to 74.6 percent, despite doubling in volume from Q1. Android-based tablets tripled in volume from Q1 and now take up close to 25 percent of the total ANZ market size. The rest of the shipments went to RIM’s PlayBook.
IDC says Acer led the Android market in Q2 “with strong sell-through thanks to being one of the first few to launch a Honeycomb device”.
"We expect the strong brand presence, the user experience and the halo effect to help maintain Apple’s dominance in the market despite the multiple launches of Android-based media tablets,” adds Lau.
IDC says the response to HP’s TouchPad “fire sales in ANZ” after the vendor announced it had ceased support for the product is evidence of how important price points are for consumers looking for a tablet device. IDC analysts expect, however, that the WebOS share will shrink to zero by Q4 2011.
The company expects Android-based tablets to reach at least 300,000 units by the end of 2011. However, Apple is expected to remain the dominant player “with more than 70 percent market share”. IDC predicts that 1.3 million units will have been shipped into the ANZ channel by the end of the current year.
Facebook’s planned changes from this year’s f8 Developer Conference may risk flooding the site with Twitter-style spambots and cause an increase in targeted attacks on its users, warns security software provider BitDefender.
Announcements at the f8 Developer Conference with take the social networking site into new usability and privacy dimensions with upcoming features such as: Subscribers, News Ticker and Wall facelifts, as well as the star of the conference, Timeline and the new Open Graph.
The New Zealand Ministry of Economic Development will deploy OpenText Content Server to boost its information service management.
The OpenText Enterprise Content Management (ECM) deployment, once completed, will provide the MED with full content lifecycle management for any type of electronic document, with a single central repository for storing, managing and organising documents.
The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), which is charged with helping government agencies and critical infrastructure against cyberthreats, has been officially opened.
“This is an important step in building New Zealand’s capacity to protect against sophisticated cyber threats,” says Steven Joyce, minister for communications and information technology, in a statement.
The centre, a key part of the government’s Cyber Security Strategy released in June, will have three main functions: to provide advice and support to help develop secure networks, to detect and respond to sophisticated cyber threats, to coordinate and assist operational responses to major cyber events of national importance.
The NCSC will also absorb the existing functions of the Centre for Critical Infrastructure Protection (CCIP).
“Cyber security is becoming increasingly important for New Zealanders, businesses and government. Cyber intrusions have the potential to impact on the reliability of critical infrastructure, government services, and the economy,” says Joyce.
The NCSC will be hosted within the Government Communications Security Bureau.
The median base salaries for IT staff in New Zealand has dropped in the past nine months but this is only temporary, reports absoluteIT.
The latest absolute IT Salary Survey, conducted every six months, says the dip is due to the short-term hiatus in spending in the sector as new initiatives are rolled out slowly amidst reduced funding, pressure on headcounts and election year uncertainty.
Lotto is rolling out LCD promotional screens to almost 600 stores nationwide, a deal that NZ Lotteries says is the biggest rollout of its kind in New Zealand.
The deal is the result of a partnership with New Zealand vendor SignActive. Most of the installations are 47 inch landscape screens, and 42 inch portrait screens have been used in sites where space is limited.
“Managers will need to relinquish their own power in favour of collaborative approaches, both inside and outside their organisations. In some cases, this means abandoning many of the behaviours that propelled leaders to the top of their organisations in the first place.”
These, according to Wendy Montague, head of leadership and talent practice at Hay Group in Australia, are some of the key changes organisations can expect in the next two decades.
Market research firm Ovum says despite the widespread discussion on the consumerisation of mobile technologies in the workplace, most corporates in Australia and New Zealand still provide the mobile devices used by staff.
"These enterprises still have a high degree of control over mobility and are not inclined to adopt a bring-your-own-device policy – at least not in the short-term," says Claudio Castelli, Ovum senior analyst.
New South Wales emergency services can now choose land mobile radio equipment designed and manufactured by Tait Radio Communications.
The Christchurch company became the first additional P25 system provider to be officially approved to operate on the Government Radio Network (GRN).
Bank of New Zealand has been selected to participate in the upcoming Microsoft SQL Server (code name Denali) Rapid Deployment Programme (RDP).
The companies involved in the programme will have the opportunity to deploy the next version of SQL Server before the software is made generally available. Company representatives will also travel to Seattle in September to provide feedback on their experiences – where all comments will be reviewed and ultimately used to shape the ongoing development of the product.
The next version of SQL Server is a cloud-ready information platform that will assist organisations to unlock business-critical insights and quickly build reporting solutions to extend data across on-premises and public cloud platforms.
Dave Thompson, head of business intelligence at BNZ, says involvement in the Denali RDP presents a huge opportunity for the organisation.
“Being one of the first New Zealand companies to deploy Denali gives us a strategic business advantage, and communicating back to the Microsoft engineering team means we can help steer development to suit our business needs – something which is invaluable.”
Microsoft says Denali aims to provide agility, scalability and optimal productivity, and includes AlwaysOn, a sophisticated disaster recovery system designed to minimise staff and technology downtime. Another new feature is Apollo, a query execution tool which dramatically speeds up analysis processes – with testing showing that query response rate was up to one hundred times faster.
“The RDP involves a select group of only 70 organisations worldwide, many of whom are Fortune 500 companies, so to have a Kiwi company in the mix is fantastic,” says Steve Haddock, business group lead, server and tools marketing for Microsoft New Zealand.
In time for the 2011 Rugby World Cup, 13 international airlines operating to and from New Zealand have signed contracts with Unisys to provide an advanced baggage reconciliation system.
The baggage reconciliation system links passengers with their bags, tracking both as they move through the system to help the airlines comply with aviation industry security requirements.
Where were you educated? In Nottingham and Manchester in England, after the family moved across from Northern Ireland where I was born.
Where do you live? We recently moved to Wadestown having previously lived in Mount Victoria, Wellington.
The cloud is transforming the way people work, play and collaborate – and this is something IT professionals should consider, as they work on the architecture for this new environment and roll out products and services.
Norm Judah, chief technology officer of worldwide services for Microsoft, highlighted how the cloud is impacting the IT ecosystem in his keynote at this year’s Tech.Ed in Auckland today.
CIO has four copies of the book to give away, courtesy of SAS – details of the draw are on CIO Facebook. Draw is for NZ residents only.