Voice&Data interviews Paul Young, CIO of the Ausenco Group, and finds being a CIO is not so much about the technology but about innovation and the people.

The Integ Group’s CEO, Ian Poole, believes we are heading for the perfect storm but it’s not the sort of storm that will sink the ship if organisations have the foresight to prepare for the inevitable disruption, then they will be the ones that prosper.

Voice&Data interviewed Greg Boorer, Founder and Managing Director of the state-of-the art data centre Canberra Data Centres, and found out that he is a passionate advocate of running a smart, green data centre for the benefit of his clients.

While there are signs of improving economic conditions, companies are still closely monitoring their operations and looking to do more with the resources already at their disposal. IT budgets are invariably being scrutinised and companies are looking at ways of moving capital expenditure to operating expenses to meet the same business goals. AT&T’s Fred Girouard looks at cost-effective IT solutions which can be deployed seamlessly across multiple locations to meet these needs.

This is the year that desktop virtualisation comes into its own.

Juniper Networks has appointed Mark Iles as Vice-President, Australia and New Zealand. [ + ]

Service provider interconnect has been standardised to bring global reach to carrier ethernet. The ENNI ratification has profound implications for carrier ethernet services and the future of global networking. [ + ]

Lower costs, greater flexibility and access to resources on demand: it’s no wonder cloud computing is attracting attention. Oracle’s Robert Gosling, Vice President of Technology Sales, Oracle ANZ, discusses the ways in which organisations can take advantage of the benefits of cloud computing while mitigating risks around security, compliance and quality of service.

Interactive Intelligence’s Brendan Maree exhorts businesses thinking about implementing IP telephony to ask one question before anything else. Why use a network architecture based on the session initiation protocol (SIP) to support internet protocol (IP) communications? Or put it this way … they should at least take a look at the SIP open communications standard and do their homework on it.

As the Director of the South Australian (SA) Government ICT Service Delivery Group reporting to the SA Government CIO, Stephen Schmid firmly believes the economic challenges that we all are facing the world over need to be met with innovative solutions - interoperable, open solutions that can be shared between governments, industry, and with the education and community sectors. Merri Mack spoke to Schmid to find out how passionate he is about bringing his beliefs to fruition and what he enjoys about his current role.

There is certainly movement in the camp when it comes to data centre transformation (DCT) with the federal government and the NSW, Victorian and Queensland state governments each planning rationalisation of their data centres. Merri Mack reports on the steps in data centre transformation and what organisations should eventually aim for.

The business benefits of eco products can rival the environmental advantages. Here’s why - and what it means to product design teams.

Information is the most valuable asset the vast majority of businesses own. Keeping this information safe from harm should be a priority for any company but this is a complex task. This article sets out some steps that need to be undertaken to protect company data.

Cisco’s acquisition of videoconferencing vendor Tandberg is interesting in itself - but the move didn’t occur in a vacuum. Andrew Collins talks to the pundits about what the acquisition means for the industry, and what else the future holds.

Cloud computing, virtualisation, unified communications and smarter ways of conserving energy in data centres were the main issues for our crystal ball gazers for 2009. Security, as usual, is still a focus and it seems it always will be with the cyber criminals always being one step ahead of the security industry. These issues will still be important for 2010 according to our pundits but we can add the National Broadband Network, the continuing explosion of data and what that means to storage, mobile broadband, 4G, desktop virtualisation and machine-to-machine technology.