IBM has secured a multi-million dollar deal to develop a complete cross-channel retail platform for Australia’s longest-standing department store group, David Jones, which IBM says will allow consumers to buy on their terms, according to their preferences.

Cloud-based help desk software provider, Zendesk, has released its new customer satisfaction index just as the company claims the sign-up of its 15,000th customer following a tripling of its revenues in 2010 and a ‘stellar’ year last year.

New Zealand’s largest full service financial institution, Westpac Life New Zealand, part of the Westpac Group, has standardised its systems on a platform from global data integration software provider, Informatica, to help power its strategic initiatives around customer centricity and big data.

Security firm Bitdefender has secured a deal with the Westpac banking group to offer the bank’s customers a one-year free subscription to its Internet security package including antivirus, antispam, firewall and parental controls as well as social networking protection against malicious pages and privacy threats.

Australia’s new government created national broadband company, NBN Co, has signed its 4000th customer, and while the company’s own internal projections had user numbers around ten times larger, the fact a government program hasn’t as yet lived up to its own projected milestones is a fact of life these days.

The Indian mobile market is forecast to grow from 812 million connections by the end of this year to 1.36 billion in 2020, but it’s not the increase in new subscribers, but the retention of existing customers, that one market analyst says should concern the country’s mobile operators.

Honda in Australia has deployed Nimsoft’s monitoring solution to enable the company to increase the company’s visibility into the performance of its applications, network devices and virtual hosts and servers.

Customer experience systems vendor, Amdocs, has just released a new solution that it claims ‘revolutionises’ how service providers can rapidly deploy innovative new data services to improve the customer experience and accelerate data services monetisation.

IT consulting firm, Transpire, and service intelligence software company, eMite, have teamed up in a partnership to tackle the ‘challenge’ of unifying siloed information sources into a single view.

Businesses are wasting time and money trying to reach people online without realising many resent big brands invading their social networks, according to a study of 72,000 consumers in 60 countries, including Australia and New Zealand.