According to a recent IDC survey of the intentions of CIOs in Australia, 20.6% of respondents were using a cloud solution. The same survey says that by 2015 the use of cloud services by Australian companies – from SMBs to enterprise-size organisations – is set to quadruple – so what does this mean for service providers and users?

Hewlett-Packard has secured a seven-year infrastructure and applications services agreement with Elders that will see the 172-year old rural services company use cloud technology to cost effectively deploy its enterprise technology refresh program.

Single suppliers are increasingly taking the place of multi-sourcing contracts in the outsourcing market, according to a new market report from one analyst firm.

Organisations which jump into the cloud without performing some form of due diligence on the personnel who will have access to their data are exposing themselves to high levels of risk according to international legal firm Norton Rose.

Chinese ICT services provider VanceInfo Technologies has announced that it will set up its ANZ headquarters in Melbourne with a commitment to create 100 new local jobs by the end of 2012. VanceInfo is listed on the New York Stock Exchange in the US but is headquartered in Beijing and 90% of its 12,000 employees are based in China.

Australian Internet start-up company, DesignCrowd.com, has had an injection of $3 million by Melbourne-based venture capital firm, Starfish Ventures, as it seeks to further expand its business into the global market. It is the second time, in tough economic times, that the company has secured investment funding.

The era of offshore contact centres seems to be on the wane with a report out today revealing that a massive 80 percent of senior executives in Australia, North America and Europe have no future plans to offshore their contact centres, and just two percent prepared to go offshore in the next year or two. However, Australia could buck the trend, if the onshore price is right!

Telstra and the Victorian Government have both signalled their willingness to take a punt on the emerging Chinese offshoring market. Last month VanceInfo Technologies which employs around 12,000 technology workers in China and 40 staff in Australia, announced it had been accepted onto Victoria’s eServices panel. The company is already engaged on development projects for Telstra’s cloud services.

A new outsourcing industry body has been launched this week, vowing to be the leader in facilitating debate on policy reform in the ICT sector, and signalling its intent to “fearlessly” engage government and industry on a wide range of public policy issues facing the ICT sector.

Business process outsourcing (BPO) is gaining ground globally in HR, engineering design and research and development, particularly in developed economies like Australia, while emerging markets newer to the BPO area are adopting first-generation outsourcing like customer care, payroll processing and help desks.