The Government has offered Australia's three mobile operators, and vividwireless, renewal of their existing spectrum allocated on 15 year licences in the late 90s and early 2000s at set prices, while the Government expects to rake in $3 billion.
Though Hayward believes that for the most part software as a
service-style offerings probably isn’t quite ready for the kind of
primetime use that meets Government’s risk-averse needs, so-called
Platform as a Service infrastructure opportunities are a different
matter.
"The clear early wins in this area are going to be in infrastructure,"
Hayward said. "So, for example, why have every agency have its own test
and development environment, when that can be made available in a
shared pool, and on an as-needed basis."
"That makes a lot of sense. That’s low hanging fruit. And we think the
savings – including environmental/sustainability savings – would be
considerable."
Government is getting closer to formalising its forward data centre
strategy, with the Australian Government Information Management Office
(AGIMO) set to complete its formulations by the end of the year.
The usual suspects among large agencies look at varying stages of
readiness. Centrelink signed a long-term enterprise licensing deal with
virtualisation leader VMware earlier this year; Immigration (a big CSC
customer) is getting quite sophisticated in their thinking on such
issues following the Systems for People program; and Australian
Taxation Office is already doing leading things in the space.
Vendors will get a glimpse at how AGIMO is thinking about the data
centre future when it names it panel contract for suppliers of data
centre services in the next two weeks.
Regardless, CSC’s Hayward says the NBN and advances in virtualisation
servicers – particularly features like VMware’s vMotion, which enables
applications to be easily and dynamically shifted between physical data
centres on the fly – Government should tweak its Gershon-inspired
roadmap to enhance its environmental deliverables.
"We should think about the optimal locations for these (data centre)
facilities. Do they really need to be in Canberra, drawing power from
the electricity grid – for example? Or can they be powered by gas, or
some renewables," Hayward said.
"We have to get smarter about the sorts of data centres we build, where they are, and the kind of power that they consume."
"We need to be thinking out of the box now. We need to think of other
ways to power data centres. We shouldn’t just be thinking about the
normal way of doing things."
David Bass
| ComOps, a leading Australian provider of business software products and services, has won a competitive tender to deploy its Salvus safety, r…
How to Make Business Discovery Work for Your Business
Business Discovery takes its cues from consumer apps. Like Google, it encourages us- ers to hunt for and explore data without worrying about or even noticing the underly- ing technology. Their entire experience is working within an intuitive interface to get real-time, self-service results with only minimal training. ...more
Try an easy-to-use set of web-enabled
tools for business-class productivity services. Office 365 provides
anywhere-access to email, important documents, contacts, and calendars
on almost any device.
