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It's a brand new role for Flinders and according to Prof Constantine shows; 'The university is very forward thinking and is taking IT seriously.' Responsible for the entire university's information management strategies in the future, he is currently developing a multi-year plan for the university which will involve an infrastructure refresh and the piloting of cloud computing for disaster recovery.
That plan will also embrace a migration to a shared services model which will see the currently devolved IT infrastructure, where a lot of equipment is run out of individual faculties, become increasingly centralised from early 2013 - either on university owned equipment or in the cloud. The university already has some experience of cloud based services, having previously moved its email to Microsoft's cloud, and using the Moodle learning management system supplied as a cloud service by NetSpot, an Adelaide based company recently bought by Blackboard.
He also has plans to consolidate voice, video and data onto a single university network.
For the last three years Prof Constantine has also chaired the AARNet Advisory Committee and kept a close eye on the development of inter-university communications networks and telepresence.
Last month saw the release of the AARNet-Cisco TelePresence Exchange. This allows Australia's universities to directly connect their telepresence or immersive videoconferencing suites, and through a gateway to the National Lambda Rail programme in the US, connect internationally.
