In all, Microsoft makes 78 recommendations in 15 policy categories in ‘Cloud for Good‘, but in a presentation in Dublin this week, Microsoft president and chief legal officer Brad Smith boiled them down into three key areas.

First, he said the cloud needs to be secure, and people need to be as confident about the security and privacy of data held in the cloud as they ever were about information stored on paper; second, the cloud needs to be sustainable and the technology industry and governments need to work together on initiatives that promote the use of renewable energy to power global data centres and not damage the environment; and third, the cloud era needs to be inclusive and accessible to all people of all abilities.

Smith acknowledged in his presentation that the company never expected to have to face litigation with the US Government – and it may yet face a further appeal – but he said it was an important matter of principle; “To establish that no government through its own unilateral process can reach into other people’s email located in other parts of the world.”

He said the prevailing new era requires cloud computing be trustworthy and on that, Governments and industry need to work together; “Security, privacy, transparency and cloud so that people can rely on us to secure their compliance in law.”

A key element of that is what Smith described as “new cyber security norms that are going to ensure…this is a peaceful aspect of human activity.”

(In a separate initiative Microsoft has this week opened its first transparency and cyber security centre in Singapore to serve Asia Pacific. This allows government agencies the opportunity to review Microsoft source code, and work with specialist Microsoft security personnel to assess cyber threats and risk.)

In terms of sustainability, Smith acknowledged that Microsoft data centres consumed the same energy as a small US state, and that this would continue to rise for Microsoft, Google and Amazon as demand for cloud grew. He said that currently 44 percent of data centre power came from renewables, and that it wanted to lift that to 60 percent in the 2020s.

Government, however, had to focus policy on this area as well, said Smith, and also explore the fast growing deployment of artificial intelligence to ensure applications remained ethical.

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Oracle’s bid – which was first proposed in January this year – has received US regulatory approval, though there are still NetSuite shareholders calling for an increased consideration.

NetSuite executives declined to comment on whether the company was facing any sort of decision paralysis from prospects who might like to see what happens after Oracle buys the business, before committing to the company’s cloud based ERP.

The company showcased a number of recent local wins including REA Group, Emma & Tom’s (though that, strictly, is a JCurve solution, the small business edition of Netsuite) and YellowBrickRoad – but all were signed, sealed and installed long before news of the proposed Oracle takeover broke.

Jason Maynard, EVP of strategy and corporate development, did, however, remind iStart that in the past, Oracle had taken two approaches to companies it bought – either integrating them or leaving them largely intact. He offered no indication of which alternative might befall NetSuite – so users and prospects are still left to play a game of wait and see.

In spite of the ongoing ownership negotiations, NetSuite continues its traditionally bullish approach to the market, telling delegates at the conference that cloud had now won the enterprise IT debate, and according to Maynard; “Cloud is the last computing architecture – also becoming the last business architecture.”

The company will this quarter launch its SuiteSuccess marketing programme in the region which is intended to speed sales and get companies onto NetSuite and productive faster than before. The programme, which is intended to get companies “from zero to cloud in 100 days” is already live in the US.

It is also working on developing additional intelligence for the system, for example using algorithms and analytics to identify evidence of possible user churn, and also to streamline supply chains.

Finally, it has released the SuiteCloud Development Framework to support users’ customisation efforts.

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A recently released Oracle survey of European organisations found that $6 out of every $10 spent on IT now came out of pockets other than the CIO’s.

That’s certainly the case at Toga Group, a private hospitality, construction and property business, where the group financial controller Michael Gowing has had a say in the transition to a new Oracle ERP and also BlackLine to streamline financial management. When it came to selecting BlackLine, the only involvement of the IT team was to confirm back-end compatibility with the current Accpac (Sage 300 ERP) which is now being replaced by Oracle, he said.

“The CIO got to say ‘yea or nay’ on the back end,” said Gowing. “This was evaluated and led by finance.”

The decision to automate more of the finance function was driven by Gowing and borne of frustration with manual processes which previously required manual reconciliation of 14 binders filled with financial statements at month end. “The back office has not kept up – we have been controlling this with people rather than systems. As a controller, I didn’t know what was going on,” he said.

It was Gowing and his team that put the systems through its paces rather than the IT group. Following the deployment of BlackLine, he said that 58 per cent of reconciliations for the last financial year had been fully automated and bank reconciliation 96 per cent plus automated.

While the enterprise finance function seems as keen as marketing to roll up its sleeves and clamber into IT, a newly released report commissioned by Pegasystems and Cognizant suggests financial services organisations’ low tolerance for risk could be holding back their willingness to innovate.

The survey of 500 finance sector executives in 56 countries found that although 98 percent recognised the need to move outside of their comfort zone, only three out of five felt their governing boards would be able to tolerate a 30 per cent innovation failure rate.

Given rapid digital disruption across sectors and the advent of cloud technologies, this suggests a change in attitude to innovation may be overdue – and shadow IT is likely to play a big part.

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He said that, as a result, smaller organisations recognised the larger companies would have likely performed due diligence on the service providers, and hence the cloud is seen as an increasingly safe bet.

Certainly in Australia and New Zealand, AWS has won a slew of corporate clients including the Australian Stock Exchange, Technology One, AMP, Xero and Domain, all of which run systems in the cloud. AMP, for example, now has 400 separate workloads running in AWS, according to CIO Craig Ryman.

“This is not just a cost play – but access to speed and capabilities. It’s moved to an innovation platform for us. The cloud has been the fuel for digital disruption,” Ryman said at a media event in Sydney.

Katherine Squire, GM application development and DevOps at the ASX, noted, however, that there is still some cloud caution, and that the ASX’s first cloud venture involved a small app because “We can’t mess it up the first time.” There was no mess-up, however, and she described a burgeoning innovation culture developing at the exchange, which will be holding its first hackathon next month with funds put aside for cloud time to support experimentation.

Mark Cohen, CTO at Domain, explained that one of the major benefits of cloud computing is that it lowers the cost of failure, to the extent that small trials which don’t work are instead characterised as experiments. This, in turn, fuels innovation efforts. He said Domain has moved from one release every three weeks, to an average release-to-production of 60 software updates per week. While these, he acknowledged, were “very small incremental pieces” it did point to a more innovative culture.

Xero’s Australian MD Trent Innes, meanwhile, said that last year it released 1,400 updates and expected that pace to increase. The company is midway through a migration to AWS and has so far transitioned more than 500,000 users from Rackspace to the Amazon cloud.

Asked about competition in the sector (AWS leads the way with Microsoft Azure chasing hard), Vogels said there was still plenty of headroom for growth and that it would not be a “winner takes all market” but there would likely be a handful of global players because of the substantial capital investment required. As to the potential emergence of new disruptors he noted; “There is no compression algorithm for experience.”

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Subject to shareholder and regulatory approval the deal has been agreed by the two companies and is expected to complete toward the end of the year.

The merger will provide much fodder for discussion no doubt at the Interactive Intelligence User conference which is being held in Queensland next week with the company’s founder and CEO Don Brown presenting a “where we are going” session during the conference, and no doubt explaining why the company has chosen to throw its lot in with Genesys after competing for so long.

Brown owns around 17 percent of Interactive Intelligence and stands to reap around $US238 million from the deal.

The company was not able to field Brown this week for an interview, though it is understood to have been weighing its alternatives for some time.

Interactive Intelligence has been transitioning to a cloud strategy through its PureCloud system and that has impacted its financials. The company last month announced that in the second quarter although revenues were up to $US108 million compared to the similar quarter a year earlier, it continued to be plagued by losses and for the second quarter to the end of June reported a net loss of $US10.8 million.

Merging with Genesys, which is a private company, will take the company’s financials out of the public eye – and also give it greater reach.

Genesys CEO Paul Segre, said that the combined product and service portfolio would appeal to customers of all sizes and committed the company to continue investment in all of Interactive Intelligence’s solutions. It may not be the only deal on the table – earlier this month Reuters ran a report suggesting that Genesys was looking to buy Avaya’s call centre business, which would further consolidate the sector.

In July, Genesys secured a $US900 million investment from private equity firm Hellman & Friedman intended to “Accelerate growth” according to Segre. The investment valued the company, then, at $US3.8 billion, and clearly provided the reserves for its current spending spree.

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In fact only 39 percent of respondents to the survey, commissioned by data warehousing and analytics company Teradata, said that they were using real time analytics, and an even scanter 15 percent said that they considered themselves “data centric” in that they constantly analysed data in real time to aid decision making. It’s an issue which has been called out by a data scientist at one of New Zealand’s top SAP partners, too. Andrew Peterson said recently that there is too much emphasis on ‘data’ and not enough on ‘analytics’.

At the same time there has been a shift in “ownership” of enterprise data projects.

In 2015 a survey of Australian and New Zealand business executives revealed that around a third of all data analytics projects were “owned” by the line of business. That has this year plunged to just 3 per cent with the CIO and IT holding the budget reins in 43 percent of cases, and CFO and finance in 24 percent.

Whoever holds the analytics purse, it’s not getting bigger according to survey respondents. Asked if there were plans to spend more in the area in the coming year, 37 percent of respondents said no. Last year it was 30 percent.

The findings are somewhat at odds with Gartner’s forecast which predicts that the Australian business intelligence and analytics market will grow 9.1 percent this year to $A700 million while New Zealand is predicted to enjoy 8.1 percent growth and reach $NZ92.3 million. ANZ CIOs also ranked business intelligence and analytics as their top priority this year.

What Gartner revealed was a shift away from IT led reporting to self-service analytics within the business.

Whether Teradata is the right company for that has already been questioned in some quarters, despite the company’s continued prowess in Gartner’s magic quadrant. Earlier this week Robert Wilson, general manager technology, strategy and architecture at Westpac bemoaned the fact that a lot of the bank’s data was still “Trapped in large and expensive Teradata machines” which he said was great for regulatory inquiries, “But really crap for anything useful around what the customer wants to do next.”

And according to Teradata, customer service remains the top priority for organisations which are leveraging their data stores.

Another issue that the Teradata report reveals is the lack of breadth in terms of data available to the enterprise. The report indicates that 91 percent of data available for analysis comes from existing internal systems. Just 1 percent comes from Internet of Things devices, 3 percent from online sources, and 5 percent of third parties.

This suggests that at present much of the effort seems to be directed to internal navel gazing efforts rather than a more holistic analysis of all data available. It also suggests that the IoT and big data are firmly in the hype, rather than practical application, phase.

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Speaking at the CXO Disrupt event in Sydney this week Wilson said that the bank “collaborated or competed head on with carnivores” which can eat an entire existing business model. However slightly more benign herbivore disruptors were competing with the bank for existing fee pools, and it was easier simply to coexist with them.

He nominated Robinhood as an example of a carnivore disruptor. The US based fintech has developed a mobile app for customers to trade shares without paying a fee, making its money instead through offering margin accounts. It’s a direct assault on the banks’ current business model.

Coinbase meanwhile, is more a herbivore; yes it’s offering a bitcoin based digital wallet – but it’s not really an attack on banks’ current operations.  There’s no reason a bank couldn’t setup something similar if it wanted.

While Wilson said that Westpac was keeping a keen eye on the competitive landscape, he made clear that he believes the incumbents’ major advantage is their access to troves of customer data.

He said that the real disruption was coming from technology’s impact on customer experience, and that required a fresh approach to dealing with data.

“It’s why banks like us are investing in start-ups…to transform our systems and the way we service our customers,” he said. Part of that could derive from the trusted position that banks hold in society, and the opportunity to monetise customers’ data.

He said that banks needed to collaborate with the “large platform players” such as Facebook and Google, in order to drive value in terms of what was being served up to customers and prospects. That he said would be one of the most powerful disruptive forces in the next five to ten years.

It will need a radical data rethink though, as Wilson acknowledged that banks were still sending three letters to a customer offering credit cards, rather than serving up true value. That, he said, was not about “selling you a mortgage” but working with the customer to get them into a house by providing insight about what the customer could afford and the best way of structuring their affairs.

He acknowledged, however, that there was a degree of immaturity regarding data application, especially given the absence of  “some solid regulation around how data should be treated” and the fact that a lot of the banks’ data was still “Trapped in large and expensive Teradata machines” which he said was great for regulatory inquiries, “But really crap for anything useful around what the customer wants to do next.”

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Steve Beards, APAC VP, said that instead the company tends to sell direct to the CFO or even CEO. “The problem with IT is it’s seen as a cost centre rather than efficiency saving,” he told iStart. He said that Flexera preferred to work with CFOs and CEOs and explain the cost savings that were possible through more effective software management, but also the compliance costs that could arise if an organisation was fined over its use of inappropriately licensed software both in terms of fines and reputational impact.

“We do have the CIO’s support but in nine out of ten cases they are not the owner of the software asset management systems – that is generally the CFO,” he said.

He said that enterprise adoption of cloud based software also heightened the need for more precise software management to ensure that companies did not end up paying more than they should for the services that they were using.

According to Gartner analyst Hank Marquis; “Automated software license optimisation is a relatively new discipline and most organisations are at lower levels of maturity. The variety of license entitlements also makes it tough for IT leaders to spot savings, especially in environments with many software publishers and titles. But it’s worth pursuing, as spending reductions contribute directly to the bottom line as gross profit.”

He said that organisations which optimised their software configurations, recycled licenses so that unused software licenses were deployed elsewhere, and effectively leveraged software asset management systems could reap significant savings.

Flexera’s enterprise focused solution is one of its fastest growing lines of business according to Beards – it’s also a homegrown solution, having originally been developed by Australian company ManageSoft before the company was bought by Flexera in 2010. Beards said that the company maintained a 60-strong engineering team for that product line in Victoria though some of the software library management is handled offshore in India.

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That realisation, he said, had led to a rethink at Jade, which has adopted a more design-led approach to systems development. “Over [the course of] ten years, we have moved from leading with systems analysts, to leading with business analysts, to now leading with user experience. Coding almost becomes an implementation detail,” he said during a media event in Sydney.

In order to foster a culture of greater creativity the organisation – which is headquartered in New Zealand – has worked with fine arts academics to encourage staff to be more creative. But, there is a limit, Ascroft acknowledged; “We don’t want to turn them into Cirque du Soleil,” he quipped – but the company clearly wants more creative nous from its developers.

That resonates for Sarah Cummings, general manager of development for Jade client ClearView. She said that when developing user facing systems solutions it was important to design “Not just functional – it needs to be beautiful,” in order to get people to use the system.

She said her appointment was also indicative of the less technical focus favoured in some enterprises. Cummings came from the business rather than the technology side of the house, and has no developers on staff, preferring instead to partner with companies like Jade.

Craig Beveridge, general manager of Jade in Australia, agreed this more design focused approach required an internal rethink. “We talk a lot now about outcomes. That can be a challenge because we have had such a stronghold in systems and platforms.” Programming he acknowledged was “Dropping down the stack” in terms of importance.

He said that making outcomes rather than systems the focus, which ultimately meant it was more likely that solutions would be a better fit for the client.

Ascroft said this approach had also impacted the hiring and organisational policies of the business, where people were expected to operate in cross-functional teams with designers and coders working together. That meant the company was “hiring on culture ahead of ability.” Someone with lesser skills but the right cultural fit, was more likely to be hired than a skilled individual who was a cultural misfit.

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The company is also seeking to boost its profile in the data analytics arena; these shifts in its focus were made clear at its recent TibcoNow conference in Las Vegas.

In Australia this week, the company’s CEO Murray Rode, said this was particularly important for organisations which were digitally reinventing themselves.

He said that as enterprise captured more and more data – from sensors or customers – it would need to deploy “augmented intelligence and machine learning applications” in order to automate business decisions and actions as there was simply too much data to handle manually.

Rode said that companies needed to pay as much attention to integrating the systems at the edges of their infrastructure as to core platforms.

But Australian Stock Exchange CIO Tim Thurman, a long time user of Tibco software, explained that it was important to ensure that integration efforts between systems did not create a new problem.

Thurman said that the ASX was one of the few international exchanges that was vertically integrated. He said that in a bid to integrate all its different platforms the ASX had developed hundreds of customised APIs. “It was like a spiderweb of data going everywhere,” said Thurman, speaking at a media event organised by Tibco in Sydney.

This injected delay and problems he said. “The continuous problems with APIs is that they need data. If that is not properly scheduled then the data will not get there at the right time.”

That had led to innovation challenges as every time something new had been introduced the ASX had to perform a complete systems regression test, to check the interdependencies.

He acknowledged that in the past the Exchange had underestimated the amount of work involved in achieving effective integration and managing data transport among platforms, but said it was now taking a different approach.

He said that the ASX was mid-way through a five year refresh initiative that would see the deployment of a Tibco enterprise wide service bus that would streamline the flow of data, help address scheduling issues and make the ASX more efficient.

Thurman said that the ASX also wanted to develop a data strategy that would allow it to become more proactive and predictive.

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Dell’s 2015 security report suggested that there had been a doubling of SCADA attacks in the previous 12 months – but also noted that such breaches often go unreported, despite the fact that they can bring industrial networks to their knees.

Jeroen De Corel, a security architect and SCADA specialist from Check Point Software Technologies has been visiting Australia and New Zealand this month and said that “in an ideal world” industrial corporations should be mandated to reveal when their systems had been breached as ultimately it could lead to a more secure environment.

The challenge for IT managers who typically have oversight of information and communications security, is that SCADA systems tend to come under the aegis of operational managers. De Coel lamented this still very siloed approach to overall enterprise security.

He, like Gartner, recommends that IT and OT work more closely together in industrial organisations. At present he said they had different priorities with OT “Focused on production and uptime, while IT is all about protecting the users.”

Another disconnect was the lifespan of operational equipment compared to IT he said. While many IT systems were written off and replaced after five years, some operational technology could be deployed for up to 15 years – with some systems in situ since before the Stuxnet virus which attacked SCADA systems was first identified.

And he said that security remained a low priority for OT managers who may have a day a year’s maintenance window, which meant security was relegated way below keeping the equipment in service for another year.

Asked about the potential impact of Internet of Things, which could send data feeds to SCADA systems, De Corel said that at present IoT deployments were mainly in the consumer rather than industrial space. However he said that should enterprises wish to connect IoT devices to industrial networks, they should do so over a secure network with information encrypted.

Separately Trustwave has this week warned that in the race to launch IoT devices security is also taking a back seat. It has identified a WiFi connected home thermostat which has a gaping security hole allowing people to access usage data which could provide burglars with a useful schedule of when people will and won’t be at home.

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All 60 Greentree staff, with the exception of Dickinson and R&D manager Steve Simms, who are both leaving the company, will transfer to MYOB. While it’s a sizeable team, it is dwarfed by MYOB’s 1,300 strong headcount.

The terms of the deal, which is effective from today, sees MYOB pay $NZ25.1 million in cash to Hei Matau Holdings 2000, the parent of Greentree, with the remaining $3.4 million to be paid in 2017 and 2018 if certain conditions are met.  MYOB sees the deal as a way to extend its enterprise footprint – which it has been growing since the launch of MYOB Advanced, and the purchase of PayGlobal.

IDC analyst Sabharinath Bala said that; “MYOB’s acquisition of Greentree will definitely help the company to expand its footprint in the mid-market space, but the capabilities from the combined entity puts in a much stronger position to offer end-to-end ERP for large enterprises as well.

“MYOB’s current flagship offerings for the large enterprises – Advanced, EXO, and Payglobal – are all solutions that pivot around financial applications, extending to other areas of ERP; but this acquisition adds capabilities around supply chain, manufacturing, distribution, ecommerce and asset management. MYOB has also been facing stiff competition from some of the new cloud-native vendors for its financial applications offerings, and this acquisition creates a better value proposition for MYOB, and puts it in a better position in both the mid-market and large enterprise segments.”

MYOB is also claiming that its online experience will be useful to the evolution of the Greentree range. It described Greentree’s product suite as having “broad, on-premise ERP functionality” and noted that most sales were still “perpetual with annual maintenance.”

Certainly it’s fair to say that Greentree has only latterly come around to the cloud, launching its software as a service in April this year – and MYOB’s statement suggests that it has yet to develop much traction for its cloud solution.

Andrew Birch, general manager of industry solutions for MYOB, said that the Greentree solution was really still a server based product and while it was available under a hosting model and some mobility functions had been added, “It’s not a real cloud based solution,” he told iStart.

Dickinson has a chequered relationship with cloud and has in the past described some cloud vendors as “sandal waving zealots”. Zealotry may have benefits though as exclusively cloud focused ERP vendor NetSuite was last week targeted by Oracle in a proposed $US9.3 billion takeover that sets the scale of the MYOB-Greentree deal in context globally.

The question now is how two quite different trans-Tasman cultures will meld, whether the development teams of MYOB and Greentree can or should be integrated, and what funds will be made available to ensure the pace of product development is maintained. A fresh glimpse of MYOB’s financial position will be available later this month when the company unveils its first half numbers.

Birch said that a 90 day transition plan was under construction, but that it was likely the Greentree team would remain focused on that product line  – though MYOB would overlay some of its processes on the organisation. He also said that the Greentree team would stay in Auckland, at least in the short term, where MYOB also has a significant presence.

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According to Gartner, in the four years until 2020, IT organisations will decommission more than three times the number of applications they have decommissioned since 2000 as they look to streamline operations.

It’s a real challenge for big business.

Speaking at Pegaworld earlier this year, ANZ chief operations officer Alistair Currie noted that one of the bank’s “dirty secrets” was that “All the time we have been using computer systems we have developed core competency in adding more.

“We have around 2,500 apps and software systems – many of them duplicates,” he said.

Gartner first advised companies to start rationalising their applications portfolios eight years ago, but it now claims that the issue has become critical and that they need to adopt a bi modal approach – keeping the lights on legacy, but separating future development.

That’s what ANZ, which is on a modernisation journey, is attempting. According to Currie; “What we are doing is to decompose the full stack, upgrade the elements we need and must do, particularly integration to make it more flexible…and in a sense isolate the remaining questions about the core books and records…having derisked and removed the components around it.”

Andy Kyte, the Gartner vice president and fellow, who has led the charge to beat the bloat and opined on it recently right here on iStart, also warned software developers this week that when it came to any new development, they needed to take an applications lifecycle view of success rather than maintaining the current project focus. He said that project owners often steered the agenda in one direction, which often overlooked the need for the eventual application to be useful over a long period of time.

“It’s not about the wedding – it’s about the marriage,” he said, noting that it was of little consequence if the software project was successful when the application was awful across its lifecycle. He said control needed to be wrested from people with a project focus, in favour of people with a clearer vision of all the stakeholder needs.

Kyte recommended that in early design meetings to discuss the application, the team have placecards at the table for “low visibility stakeholders” such as the business users of the system, the software maintenance team, and the group that would one day have to change the application to meet shifting business needs.

He also recommended attention be paid to the international standard for software development – IEC 25010 – and its eight sets of requirements addressing the eventual application’s security, functionality, usability, reliability, compatibility, efficiency, maintainability and portability.

Kyte said that; “From my perspective – functionality is the least important feature of an application… functionality is about a relevant to the application as the colour is to a car.”

Instead software developers should focus on its “’analysability’, changeability, stability, testability, and maintainability/compliance.”

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The security threat facing ANZ organisations is mounting. PwC’s 2016 global information security survey revealed that the number of incidents detected by Australian organisations had risen 109 percent.

The most recent report from the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) revealed that in 2014-15, CERT Australia responded to 11,733 incidents.

According to Richard Bergman, PwC partner in the cyber and forensics business, while the concern about cyberattack had “skyrocketed” and boards know that they need to manage the risk “they don’t really understand it.”

Game of Threats is intended to simulate what can happen in an attack to promote greater understanding both of organisational vulnerabilities and avenues of response.

Attack teams can choose whether to assume the mantle of a state sponsored group, organised crime gang, and insider or a hacktivist and then play compromise or breach cards which trigger responses including synthesised social network responses to give the company team a sense of what a real breach might feel like.

The company team can choose to invest in infrastructure or people, to prepare, respond and remediate a situation.

Points are awarded – and if the score is -100 the bad guys are judged the winner, if the score is +100 then the white hats win. “The bad guys usually win first, then they learn what do to and it swings to the company’s favour – pretty much like real life,” said Bergman.

The solution was developed by PwC’s innovation team in Washington DC, and tailored for large enterprises, which may put as many as 100 of their senior executives. Bergman said however that the game can be adapted locally to make it more real for the company sector and geography an organisation operates in. Bergman said that medium enterprises meanwhile could opt for a more affordable untailored version of the game, which takes about two hours to complete.

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According to Clifford Foster, Deloitte Consulting partner and platform engineering leader; “This is part of the larger capability we are trying to build. There’s a real advantage having it internally,” rather than maintaining the arm’s length arrangement, he said.

Foster said that although Deloitte had capability in the platform engineering and systems integration area in its international offices, particularly in North America and Europe, it was “not in abundance” in Australia or New Zealand. “While we consulted we lacked the deep expertise to implement,” he said.

How much Deloitte has paid to beef up its implementation capability has not been revealed. It has however been spending up big of late buying in teams from Cloud Solutions Group, Qubit Consulting, Dataweave and Digivizer.

Clifford however said that it was “Far more than a grab bag” of IT skills sets that the company had acquired, rather the takeovers represented a realignment of Deloitte’s ANZ capabilities.

With Sixtree it acquires a team skilled in the use of MuleSoft, Elastic, Red Hat and Amazon Web Services technologies.  The company’s chief technology officer, Saul Caganoff, who will become a Deloitte principal come August, said that Sixtree had “Approached this with a reasonable amount of caution, then care” as it wanted to ensure there was an appropriate culture fit between the companies.

“We have been working with Deloitte on a number of projects and have worked well together,” he said.

He explained that Sixtree’s recent growth trajectory was partly responsible for the sale as that was becoming very hard to sustain. Also the company was mindful that it was approaching; “the magic number of 100 (staff) where a lot of companies struggle.”

Sixtree had already identified that there would be structural changes required to sustain the growth and also that to “work further up the strategy chain would require quite a bit of effort and expenditure.”

Following the Deloitte acquisition Sixtree personnel can be parachuted into that strategy work, while Deloitte will at the same time be able to plug some gaps in its implementation repertoire.

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In Australia IT spending should reach A$83.3 billion this year, with software sales of $10.6 billion overtaking devices on $10.4 billion. IT services at $30.6 billion are the biggest ticket item followed by the $29 billion spent on communications services.

New Zealand’s IT spending is forecast to rise 1.9 percent to almost NZ$11.3 billion.

Communications services in NZ is forecast to be almost flat this year at $4.3 billion, IT services will be up slightly to $3.4 billion while software sales will rise to $1.4 billion.

Gartner’s second quarter update on global IT spending found that overall the IT market for 2016 is absolutely flat.

According to Gartner: “This is not exactly a rebound from the six percent decline in IT spending in 2015, but it is good news. The rapid rise in the value of the US dollar against most currencies during the past couple of years has put a currency shock into the global IT market.”

The impact of the Brexit on global currencies and demand is likely to begin to have an impact during the current quarter however, and it seems likely that even the US market will be in wait-and-see mode until the outcome of the US election is known. Volatility is the new normal. This current Gartner report was based on the assumption that the UK would not exit Europe – the next quarterly report may deliver some surprises for the IT vendors.

According to the Gartner report the US remains the largest single market for IT spending at $US1.8 trillion. “However, the fastest-growing region is Emerging Asia/ Pacific, with 2016 constant-currency growth of 4.8 percent (revised down 1.1 percent from the 1Q16 update).”

Globally the enterprise software market is tipped to grow seven percent this year spurred by demand for cloud-based office solutions. Emerging Asia Pacific and Greater China markets in particular are deploying cloud office solutions, such as Office 365, rather than buying on premise office systems.

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She studies the psychology of how humans interact with robots, and while that may seem esoteric it’s important in terms of understanding how robots are used – or abused – by human workforces. For example early studies have shown how soldiers working with bomb disposal robots have been unwilling to send them back into the field in case they are blown up.

“Military personnel become very attached to tools they use – like bomb disposal units – the fact that robots are saving their lives.

“They give them funerals with gun salutes. But it’s also a bit worrying because the robots are not intended for this. If you have people hesitating for even a second to use the robot the way it was intended then that can be dangerous,” said Darling who was speaking at an event organised by Slattery IT.

Gartner has already issued warnings to CIOs and technology teams not to anthropomorphise artificial intelligence or cognitive computing platforms, recommending that terms such as “smart machines” be encouraged instead – in part to manage enterprise expectations.

But according to Darling; “This is biologically hardwired in us. The design of robots is increasingly moving toward pushing those buttons in people and engaging with people, we will increasingly view robots as something that’s alive – but it’s not.”

She said her research was intended to analyse how people anthropomorphise robots, and the impact that has on how the robot is used. Naming a robot seems to have a significant impact, and can help with human acceptance of a robot in a workplace. However naming it also means people will potentially protect the robot rather than use it for what it has been designed.

“Robotics is really important right now. Robots are moving from behind scenes in factories in cages and to new areas of world, to transportation systems and hospitals and households – and starting to interact with people in a way we haven’t seen before.”

And while this opened up new business opportunities – deploying robots in prisons, in aged care, in child care – Darling said that it was important people grappled with the ethics of doing that, and also the impact it might have on humans.

“Could it affect or impede development in children? The same way we don’t let small children play violent video games, but robots bring it to a new level because of the physicality of our interactions.”

She said that she was excited about the potential applications of robots in health and education, for example to bridge communication between autistic children and adults or to teach language.

“But there are a lot of uses that concern me and other people working in robot ethics. Corporations are the ones that will be controlling the technology and their interests may not always line up with those of consumers.

“So it might be cool to have a robot vacuum cleaner – but it might be collecting a lot of data about your home as they get smarter. There are a lot of privacy concerns.

“And are we using robots not as a supplement to people but replacing them – for example in elder care or childcare situations?

“There is the question of emotional manipulation. Corporations or governments which control the technology – those would be my main concerns.”

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He said from that vantage point it was clear that most Oracle partners – even large ones like Oakton and RedRock were still on-premise centric. “But it was clear the market had shifted,” he said and along with a handful of other ex Oracle and partner staffers, Downie founded PrimeQ which he believes has a 12-18 month head start as a cloud-only solutions provider.

Oracle ANZ however is no longer the company that Downie left with the company now seeking a replacement for former managing director Tim Ebbeck.

Nevertheless according to technology analyst Gartner the cloud transition is well underway and it has forecast that by 2020, a corporate “no-cloud” policy will be as rare as a “no-internet” policy is today.

Downie said that the trigger for many organisations moving to the cloud was end of life of existing in house platforms, or a fundamental change in business requirements. “The main one is being locked into an old version and realizing it will be expensive to update. The shift to the cloud is quicker.”

For ERP users he said that the cloud had made solutions more affordable and easier to implement and update.  Once on the cloud updating was automatic with vendors pushing out new version of the product rather than tying ERP users to “long winded expensive upgrade processes like a hamster on a wheel.”

Implementation could also be faster he said. Downie said that a project currently underway for a local council with 500 users will see the transition to the cloud completed between June and September while an on premises overhaul of the platform could have taken 12 months.

PrimeQ is also eating its dogfood and deployed an Oracle cloud solution to manage the business.  Downie said that it planned to trial new developments in house before rolling out to customers.

With offices in Adelaide and Melbourne, and presence in Sydney, Brisbane and Auckland, the currently 50-person business has also set up development centres where it can tailor solutions for clients, and write add on modules where required using Oracle’s platform as a service.

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Oracle’s machine grinds slowly – and although a spokesman confirmed yesterday that Ebbeck had left – at time of writing the corporate website still has him in the role. A former head of SAP in Australia Ebbeck came into Oracle after a stint at NBN Co with plans to disrupt the business and spur massive growth on the back of perceived demand for cloud computing solutions. Last year the company announced a 1,000 strong sales recruitment drive across the region.

Regarding Mark Troselj’s departure, NetSuite has issued a statement saying that; “Mark has been a tremendous asset during his six years’ tenure at NetSuite, helping to grow the business locally and across APJ, and we wish him the best of luck in his future endeavour.” The company has not commented about any plans to replace Troselj.

Troselj’s position first came into question in 2015 when Lee Thompson was appointed senior vice president and general manager for the company in Asia Pacific and Japan. Thompson complained last August that the company’s regional profile was not a patch on the company’s overseas performance, and set about boosting the number of partners in the region.

Earlier this year NetSuite’s former ANZ sales director Vince Randall left the company to join another ERP vendor Epicor as regional vice president.

Thompson joined NetSuite after a brief stint as chief operating officer of Brisbane based Technology One before deciding he was temperamentally more suited to working for international, US based technology companies having previously served time at Salesforce and Oracle.

In the networking space ITnews reported last week that both Brocade and Ruckus Communications had spilled their local managing directors ahead of the integration of the companies.

Gary Denman’s LinkedIn profile confirms that he is now managing director of Intel Security in Australia and New Zealand. Pat Devlin reportedly leaves Ruckus next week – his LinkedIn profile remains unchanged apart from a note that Ruckus is now a part of Brocade.

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While 48 percent of respondents said when using a personal device at home they would make purchases and allow websites to store credit card details for convenience; just 13 percent of people would do that in a work setting. Conducted on behalf of security firm ESET the survey also found that 20 percent of consumers were also willing to store credit card details on mobile apps.

When it comes to passwords 35 percent of consumers create passwords based on a favourite word, phrase, name or personal details compared to 18 percent in the work setting.

Nick FitzGerald, Senior Research Fellow at ESET, warned; “Weak cybersecurity behaviours on personal devices can lead to ease of identity theft, ransomware attacks, phishing, and more. Seemingly small things, like your passwords, could be the gateway hackers and e-criminals are looking for.

“Keep your passwords long, complex, and different on every site. This can make them difficult to remember, and even more difficult if you follow the typical advice that you change them regularly.”

In terms of public wi-fi, the survey revealed that 49 percent of personal consumers would use such networks when available, as would 26 percent of people looking for connection to work.

Norton by Symantec agrees that there is too much reliance on public wi-fi, citing statistics that show more than 4.3 million Australians use public wi-fi hotspots.

But it warns that while public wi-fii is convenient, it’s never safe and can expose information such as passwords, photos and credit card numbers to hackers and identity thieves. The company will next week launch a product to encrypt information being passed through public wi-fi.

While the issue of computer security never goes away, IBM’s most recent survey of the costs of data breaches, conducted in association with the Ponemon Institute revealed that in a survey of 12 countries, Australia was the only nation where the average cost of a data breach fell in the last 12 months.

The report indicated a 6.6 percent drop in the cost of the average data breach in Australia (down to US$2.44 million) while globally the average cost of a data breach reached US$4 million – up from US$3.79 million a year ago.

However IBM’s ANZ security business unit executive Glen Gooding, warned the drop did not indicate the beginning of a long term decline in attacks, rather that Australian enterprise had got a little better in terms of its response.

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