Almost two in three (57 percent) Australian manufacturers plan to install robotics solutions in the future – many more than the one in four considering Internet of Things solutions.

Canvassing the views of the members of several of Australia’s leading manufacturing associations the survey also revealed that 49 percent had invested in some form of automation in the last 12 months.

A manufacturing robotics roundtable organised by Universal Robots in Sydney yesterday heard that in the last year 700 robots had been imported to Australia as organisations sought to boost productivity and improve their ability to compete.

Speaking at the event, manufacturing sector analyst Peter Roberts said that the industry continued to grow in Australia – but at a pace slower than the rest of the economy. The sector was worth $106 billion a year, he said, however a rising tide of imports generated a $100 billion annual current account deficit in manufactured goods.

Robotics are touted as an opportunity to reduce costs, and boost quality and efficiency, allowing local manufacturers to compete with international rivals. However Shermine Gotfredsen, APEC general manager for Universal Robots, said that despite the survey results showing interest in robotics Australian manufacturing lagged other nations with a lower awareness of new technologies, and a perception that robots introduced cost and risk. She said that there was still a degree of scepticism about what robots could deliver to SMEs.

Victorian based injection moulding business Prysm Industries however has overcome that scepticism and found that its $1,000 a month cost to lease a robot was recouped rapidly through daily labour cost savings of $500. Production manager Matthew Murphy said that a total investment of $45,000 was recouped in a year and also delivered flow on workers’ health and safety benefits and had lifted production quality.

“The investment was worth the risk,” he said.

Jason Furness, managing director of consulting business Manufactureship, said that for most SME manufacturers; “The big opportunity isn’t cost reduction it’s the technical capability I can create – that’s where you get a faster ROI and support the growth of the business.”

He said that the final advantage Australian manufacturers had over their international peers was the relative geographic isolation of Australia and the speed at which overseas products arrived.

When local manufacturers were part of a supply chain, if they were able to embrace new technologies and innovation to make them more cost effective and able to respond to changing demand, they would be better positioned to compete for small flexible manufacturing tasks.

The Commonwealth Bank is the latest in a series of corporate users of virtual reality applications. The bank this week announced a pilot of a virtual reality learning system aimed at primary school aged children to teach them financial literacy.

The pilot of the VR version of its Start Smart program, will run across 24 schools. After an in-class lesson students will be given a book and VR headset – optimistically named “The Teleporter” – that fits a smartphone, to take home to use with their parents. Once an app is downloaded onto the phone it slides into the head mount to deliver a VR experience that explains to children the difference between “need” and “want”.

Separately the bank has developed a VR workplace that job applicants can use to get a feel for what it might be like to work at the bank.

Interest in virtual and augmented reality applications is rising. Earlier this year analyst Telsyte predicted 110,000 VR headset units would be sold in Australia this year rising to 500,000 by 2020.

What classes as a VR headset varies wildly.

The bank’s version of VR relies on a cardboard box headmount that holds the smartphone, akin to the Google Cardboard which can be bought online for around $15. The Oculus Rift meanwhile can set you back many hundreds of dollars, Microsoft’s HoloLens thousands.

But companies aren’t waiting for the top end to settle.

Real estate company REA Group this month announced that it was launching a realestate VR application that will allow people to download an app onto an Android smartphone and use that to take a virtual tour of a property.  While the company hasn’t announced a date for the release of the tool, CIO Nigel Dalton said that the popularity of Pokemon Go had demonstrated a consumer appetite for VR that companies should seek to exploit.

Myer this year also announced a VR department store that displays Myer products, via a smartphone app and Google Cardboard or Samsung Gear.

VR is also making its way into other less commercial areas. Last month Alzheimer’s Australia Victoria released a virtual reality app called Edie that, when used in conjunction with Google Cardboard, allows people to experience the world through the eyes of someone with dementia which is providing useful insights to carers, family members and aged care architects.

Generally, startup companies attend the event – which for the last eight years has proven a magnet for venture capitalists and angel investors – to secure funds or management talent and advice. This year, company after company acknowledged that it was access to skills which is proving the biggest barrier to growth. Specifically, more developers are needed.

Some made quite candid statements to the effect that they didn’t need money – some were listed, some were already cash positive – but they did need skills, and were attending the event to try and poach some.

Lorica Health CEO Paul Nicolarakis was on the cash positive side of the house – his business identifies fraud and waste in healthcare, and its software and services have been deployed by health insurers to recoup funds. He invited any developers wanting a job to approach him directly.

Sean Hamawi, co-founder of software business Plutora, was in the same boat, telling delegates at the event; “We have struggled to hire …Sydney is equally as challenging as Silicon Valley.” He said that Plutora was forging links with universities in order to take the cream of the crop of graduates from UNSW and Sydney University.

Plutora was one of a series of enterprise focused startups at the event, with its platform to test and manage software releases from large scale DevOps teams. Started in 2012, Hamawi said that the company would this year achieve just under $9 million in revenues, with a customer base of blue chips including NAB, Target, and PayPal.

Unlike many companies which often attend Tech23 cap in hand, Plutora had actively avoided taking any venture funds, he said. “We are still self-sufficient and have no external VC,” that, he added, thanks to a strong global pipeline.

While access to skills was a persistent theme at Tech23, the diversity of innovation on display was as broad as ever – ranging from the listed ResApp which is developing a smartphone solution that will allow respiratory diseases to be diagnosed by people coughing into the phone, through to Biteable, an online video creation tool aimed at SMEs, that does for video production what Canva did for graphic design.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning were also showcased by a range of companies leveraging the technology for everything from mass surveillance from Black AI to intelligence software for drones by Hovermap.

NAB customers were left fuming last week when they were unable to get through to customer call centres, or use mobile internet banking and experienced delays with the processing of some payments. The failure of the systems left some people without access to funds.

Andrew Hagger, chief customer officer, took the unusual step of issuing a mea culpa video and apologised for “letting our customers down,” even though, strictly speaking it is IBM rather than NAB which manages many of those systems.

The bank noted at the time that “any outage is unacceptable and we apologise again to our customers affected overnight and this AM. We’re working to make things right ASAP.”

It did – only to see the systems fall over again on Monday. And because of the volume of calls about the problem, customers couldn’t get through to the contact centre this time either.

This time the outage affected some people’s ability to use their NAB cards in ATM machines or Eftpos devices. The systems failure also led to health providers being unable to use the HICAPS electronic payment system to process patient insurance cards.

NAB’s less than helpful tweet suggested that people frustrated by the systems failure instead return to bricks and mortar branches.

While branches do still play an important role, persistent systems failures make a mockery of organisations’ digital transformation strategies.

While there is little information about what has triggered this latest outage a report in ITNews lays the blame for last week’s failure squarely on IBM. That report suggested human error triggered last week’s failure.

NAB and IBM inked an agreement five years ago which saw the tech vendor buy the banks computing infrastructure in its local data centre and also employ 450 former NAB staff. Since then, IBM has been responsible for managing NAB’s business critical applications, including inter-bank payments, exchange gateway, internet banking and its ATM network, along with driving a technology refresh through the bank.

Monday’s outage lasted a couple of hours and services gradually came back on line from early afternoon. However IBM’s reputation has taken a battering this year with the NAB failures following hard on the heels of the ABS Census debacle.

Just a few days after the entire State was blacked out following a massive storm, South Australian capital Adelaide has signalled that it still wants to be the fastest city in Australia. Once a manufacturing power house, South Australia has lost much of its prowess, and is now seeking to reinvent itself.

It is already committed to becoming a Smart City and has conducted a series of autonomous vehicle trials.

Now Adelaide City Council has given ‘in principle’ agreement for a 10 gigabit per second optical fibre network to be constructed that will connect local businesses, government and researchers to the cloud and one another.

The City Council’s associate director information management, Peter Auhl, said that a business case would now be crafted that was intended to deliver “infrastructure for the future.” He was not able to give an indication of when the network might be installed – other than it “would not be an elongated process” – or how much it would cost, but noted that a series of options would be canvassed including a public-private-partnership arrangement so that South Australian residents aren’t left to foot the bill for the future.

The 10 Gbps speed was selected as it offered a “financial sweet spot” for businesses to connect to optical fibre networks, though Auhl told iStart that in five years much faster connections of up to 100 Gbps might be possible.

Auhl said that at presen,t there were some organisations in Adelaide which were struggling with business to business communications over the internet. “Internet connectivity is not what it should be,”; and he said the contention for bandwidth with online entertainment services such as Netflix and Stan compounded the problem.

Adelaide’s 10 Gbps network would be “complementary” to the NBN, according to Auhl, and dedicated to business rather than consumer use.

“This is really how to accelerate the infrastructure and help Adelaide through its economic transition,” said Auhl. The City is also hoping to attract more entrepreneurs and startups.

Adelaide Lord Mayor Martin Haese said that he was confident the network would attract new business and entrepreneurs to the City, particularly “large, digital-reliant businesses such as those within the health, creative, finance and defence sectors.

Those businesses need power as well as communications links and last week’s State wide power outage has dented South Australia’s reputation. A fast network is fine – but not if you can’t plug in your connecting computer. Auhl acknowledged that the blackout had been a problem but said that the power outage was an unprecedented event. “We are unlikely to see those events regularly in the CBD,” he said.

Buoyed by its win in the US courts over US Government attempts to force the company to hand over email records stored in its Dublin data centre, Microsoft has released a 222 page report bristling with recommendations about how to optimise the cloud computing era.

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.

Organisations grappling with growing data collections are the target of new industry association, Data Governance Australia (DGA), which will be helmed by former competition watchdog Graeme Samuel.

The organisation said it will engage in community consultation before publishing a series of codes which will outline best practice regarding data collection and use. While there won’t be a ‘tick of approval’ logo for participating organisations, Samuel said membership of the DGA would oblige an organisation to conform to the code; any which didn’t would be outed, or potentially ousted.

He said the goal was to create a “Self-regulated environment that addresses the issues of integrity, accountability transparency and trust.” At the same time, he would seek to strike a balance between the competitive expectations of corporations and the rights and privacy expectations of consumers, indicating his firm preference for self-regulation over legislated compliance with regard to data use, access and breach notification.

The new body, which was first canvassed by the Association for Data Driven Marketing and Advertising in April this year, comprises twelve founding board members from a cross-section of Australian industry, including major financial institutions, leading retailers, a law firm, real estate, an airline, and specialist data suppliers including technology, software and consulting service providers.  Organisations involved initially include Quantium, Coles and Woolworths, NAB and Westpac, Veda, Qantas Loyalty, Data Republic and IAG.

DGA has been charged with creating standards and benchmarks “around the collection, use and management of data in Australia. It will provide education, thought leadership and advocacy services to its members to promote and foster understanding of how data can be used responsibly to drive innovation and competitive advantage whilst complying with all regulatory requirements,” Samuel said.

Membership of DGA will be open to all sizes of business, though Samuel said that the fee structure had yet to be determined – but that it would be scaled so as not to prohibit SMEs from taking part.

“If we had a KPI it would be that the code of conduct would be widely adopted,” he added, and accepted by both the Australian community and governments.

Having an industry code rather than regulations would allow more flexibility and updates to reflect changing technology and consumer expectations, he said.

The ranks of the Australian IT services business are set to thin further with the proposed $349 million takeover of Canberra based ASG Group by Japan’s Nomura Research Institute. The deal, which has received the support of the ASG board, still needs to secure the support of shareholders in December, and the Foreign Investment Review Board.

If the deal goes ahead, which is widely expected, it will mark the second major Australian IT services company to fall to foreign ownership this year.

In March, CSC completed the $428 million takeover of UXC which was at the time Australia’s largest independent IT services company.

ASG is one of only a handful of major locally-owned IT services businesses left, along with companies including SMS Management & Technology, RXP and Data#3.

The 20-year old ASG has around 800 staff, dwarfed by the much larger Nomura which boasts about 10,000 people around the world. As part of the arrangement, ASG founder and CEO Geoff Lewis is being invited to remain with the company following the takeover.

With a swag of blue chip clients including Qantas, QBE and ANZ, along with State and Federal Government users, ASG focuses mainly on delivering ERP solutions, managed services and business analytics and is a partner with international technology giants such as Oracle and Symantec.

The company’s recently released annual report provided no hint that it was seeking a financial partner or buyer. Instead it revealed a healthy set of numbers with record revenues up 16 percent to $188 million, and EBITDA up 32 percent to $26.7 million.

While Nomura will inherit $2.9 million of debt, it also gets access to a stream of revenues from ASG’s cloud New World platforms. The annual report reveals that it already has $185 million of revenues locked in for 2017.

Not all IT services businesses are created equal, however, and this year’s reporting season has revealed a mixed bag of results for local listed IT services companies.

RXP saw organic revenues rise 29 percent to $127 million and EBITDA almost doubled to $18 million; Data #3 lifted revenues 13 percent to $983 million and EBITDA was up 31 percent to $22.4 million. SMS meanwhile, which has been reorganising, suffered an 8 percent revenue slide to $328 million while EBITDA slumped 45 percent to $15.7 million.

Hundreds of NetSuite users gathered in Sydney this week for the company’s fifth SuiteConnect user conference in this region. While delegates were treated to NetSuite’s view of the future, not once did they learn what that future might look like from within Oracle’s grasp. On stage, at least, it was a clear case of “don’t mention the war.”

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.

In the US 74 percent of enterprises already offer or plan to offer choose your own device (CYOD) programmes, which often favour Apple; in Australia Telsyte has estimated that around 70 percent of organisations offer either CYOD or bring your own device.

Spurring the adoption of Apple are the agreements that the company now has in place with Microsoft, IBM, and as of this week Deloitte, which has announced the formation of a dedicated “Apple practice” with over 5,000 advisors focused on leveraging iPhones and iPads in order to transform workplace practices and inject mobility into client operations.

Deloitte itself has deployed 100,000 iOS devices running 75 custom apps.

This enterprise push will be important for Apple which is facing a series of market challengers in both the consumer and business sectors. Apple for example is clearly losing share in the smartphone market globally. Figures released this month by IDC have it with 13.9 percent of the global market this year, down 12 percent. Android has clearly won that war.

IDC also has Android leading the pack in tablet sales now and through to 2020. Apple currently is in second slot with 22.4 percent share compared to Android on 66.2 percent and Windows tablets with just 11.3 percent share. IDC, however, predicts that by 2020 Windows devices will take market share from the Android camp and be nipping at Apple’s heels with 19.3 percent share by 2020.

Dean Hager, CEO of Jamf Software, which sells specialist software to support enterprise IT teams managing Apple devices in the workplace, was in Australia this week, and believes that CYOD coupled with enterprise transformation initiatives hinged around mobile technology to drive productivity, will deliver Apple an increasing share of the enterprise market.

He said that it had taken Jamf 14 years to secure 6,500 customers by the end of 2015. In the year to date it has added a further 2,500 clients. One of its most recent wins is NASA which is sending iPads to the International Space Station, managed from the earth using Jamf.

According to Hager; “The force of iOS is not just user choice, but transformation of the work environment. Apple is now being used as a point of sale in retail, for lorry drivers’ daily logs. It is being used for business transformation.”

Hager said that Apple’s Device Enrolment Programme was also spurring the technology’s progress into the enterprise as it allowed IT managers “zero touch deployment” of new devices. Once an Apple device is powered up it connects to the DEP, which the enterprise can load with preconfigured services and applications, and be automatically populated with the apps the company nominates.