IT services giant CSC has announced that Mike Lawrie will take up the reins as president and CEO before the end of March this year. It’s a case of CEO revolving doors as Mr Lawrie’s previous employer is being taken over by another company which wasn’t planning to make him CEO.

St George Bank’s website reappeared on Monday evening after prolonged "technical issues” – although it remained possible while the web site was off air to log on and use the online banking and business banking services suggesting that the core banking systems (the Hogan platform supplied by CSC) weren’t affected.

In the latest round of musical chairs in Westpac’s IT department Sarv Girn, the bank’s group general manager of enterprise services, is understood to be leaving early in the new year.

Gartner Group has sharpened its research focus on cloud computing by splitting its previous Magic Quadrant for 'Cloud Infrastructure as a Service and Web Hosting' into one for 'Managed Hosting and Cloud IaaS' and Magic Quadrant for 'Public Cloud Infrastructure as a Service.'

The sense that today is crunch time for Europe has the financial markets on a knife edge; but it could also open the doors for IT skills as expats and Europeans concerned at the situation in the Northern Hemisphere look to the apparently more benign Australian market for jobs in 2012.  

Cloud computing has sparked levels of IT awareness among company directors not seen in Australia since ERP was first trumpeted as an important productivity tool.

The desire to connect their employees through the multitude of computing devices in use today is reportedly the primary reason for enterprises, including Australian companies, to make the move to cloud computing, according to a worldwide survey of nearly 4,000 IT decision makers.

Westpac has announced that its high profile chief information officer Bob McKinnon is stepping back from his full time group executive role and will no longer be the bank’s chief information officer. The news comes less than a fortnight after the bank took steps to axe 188 IT positions as part of a major shakeup.

Less than a week after Westpac managing director Gail Kelly announced that the bank was planning to move to a “best sourcing” model the bank has announced to the Financial Services Union that it’s slashing 188 jobs as a result of a restructure of the IT department.

EMC has launched its Australian service provider partner program to support the company’s public and private cloud services, with initial partners already signed up to the highest tier of the program, including Telstra, Macquarie Telecom, Melbourne IT, Infoplex, Dimension Data and CSC.