Stories by Rohan Pearce

Microsoft has revealed that Australians will be able to purchase Microsoft Surface Pro tablets from 30 May.

There's not much for the ICT industry to get excited about in the federal budget, unveiled last night, according to Telsyte analyst Rodney Gedda.

The Labor government has earmarked $102.2 million over the next half decade to upgrade the Department of Human Services child support payment system, dubbed 'Cuba'.

PCI compliance – the body of regulations applying to businesses that process credit and debit card payments – "absolutely annoys the living crap" out of Scott Rosicka.

Adobe has announced a major shift in its software strategy, revealing that Adobe CS 6 will be the final boxed version of its major design, publishing and photography products. Instead, the vendor will focus on delivering regular updates to its subscription-based Creative Cloud versions of popular applications such as Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign.

Australian spending on business process management (BPM) software will have double digit growth this year, according to analyst firm Gartner.

IT systems that are approaching a decade old at the Victorian Department of Premier and Cabinet (DPC) pose a risk to the confidentiality of state government documents, according to a request for expressions of interest issued by the DPC.

Gartner predicts that by 2016, public cloud spending in Australia will reach US$5.2 billion. The analyst firm is forecasting that Australian spending on public cloud will reach US$3.2 billion this year, representing a growth rate in excess of 23 per cent. It puts Australia ahead of the global average of 18.5 per cent growth for 2013.

New South Wales finance minister Greg Pearce has urged the state's ICT industry to participate in the public consultation on implementation of the government's ICT strategy.

Amazon Web Services today launched its Sydney-based technical support centre. AWS flagged the opening of a technical support operation last year, when it launched the Sydney infrastructure region for its cloud computing services.

Online gift voucher retailer RedBalloon plans to employ cloud-based data warehousing to store and analyse data generated by its customers.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has announced it is taking Internet service provider Netspeed to court for alleged breaches of Australian Consumer Law.

Cloud service providers have previously drawn ire from environmentalists for not being transparent when it comes to the energy efficiency of their data centres.

When it comes to disaster recovery — assuming they don't ignore DR altogether — Australian businesses have a tendency to overestimate just how quickly they could retrieve their data if an incident occurs.

NSW Health has advertised for a chief information officer for the Southern NSW Local Health District.