The new penalties include the Universal Service Obligation (USO) payphone performance benchmark and retail customer service guarantee performance (CSG) benchmark.

According to Senator Conroy, complying with performance benchmarks is crucial and the consequence of failing to meet them carries a substantial financial penalty.

“However, the Government has adopted graduated penalties, as suggested by a number of stakeholders, to provide appropriate incentives for service providers to maximise their compliance with these key benchmarks,” he said.

The Telecommunications (Infringement Notice Penalties) Determination 2012 graduated scale of infringement notice penalties in relation to CSG and USO performance benchmarks include:

· $330,000 where a benchmark is missed by less than two percentage points · $660,000 where a benchmark is missed by two percentage points or more but less than five percentage points, and · $990,000 where a benchmark has been missed by five percentage points or more.

The Minister has also fixed infringement notice penalties (ranging between $22,000 to $99,000) for the breach of other regulatory requirements related to the CSG, location and removal of payphones, and marketing of premium-priced mobile services.

“In its submission, the ACCAN suggested that a higher penalty could be considered where a telecommunications provider does not comply with the TIO scheme in accordance with section 132 of the Telecommunications (Consumer Protection and Service Standards) Act 1999,” Senator Conroy said.

The Government is currently in discussion with the ACMA if it should implement additional provisions regarding the TIO scheme, which the ACMA considers should be listed as infringement notice penalties.

The Government has also not yet responded to stakeholder suggestion of lowering infringement penalties if benchmarks are not met in rural and remote parts of Australia.

Source: http://www.arnnet.com.au/article/416172/government_sets_new_penalties_telco_consumer_safeguard_breaches/

Telstra has embarked on a fresh data quality initiative in a bid to cut the number of erroneous site visits and returned bills caused by bad data.

The program, which kicked off last year, saw finance take over some responsibility for Telstra’s data governance while IT set up a Data Management Centre of Excellence to look after critical master data sets.

According to Telstra’s chief architect of information and corporate architecture Mark Kortink, it was the latest of several data governance attempts by the telco.

“Data governance in Telstra is run by finance,” Kortink told the CIO Strategy Summit in Melbourne last week, adding that CIO Patrick Eltridge was an “active participant” in the program.

“IT plays a role in data quality fix projects and some of the data stewardship stuff around key data.”

Addressing chief information officers from Australian banks, airlines and government agencies, Kortink described IT as the “dams, pipes, pumps and tanks” of data.

Data and IT were two different resources, he said, with the latter classified as a fixed asset on company balance sheets and the former more difficult to value.

Yet data was the third most important resource in a company, he said, after money and people.

“Companies are pretty good at IT; we’re not quite as good at managing data,” Kortink said.

“A lot of companies have had a shot at proper data management but they never seem to really take the way that accountants have taken control of financial management or HR has taken control of people management.”
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Echoing the comments made by members of the Institute of Actuaries Australia last September, Kortink said poor data quality was to blame for about 20 percent of errors across the industry.

For Telstra, errors may manifest as “ineffective truck rolls and returned bills”. Kortink declined to disclose the cost and frequency of those errors, but said there was a business case for projects that addressed them.

“How do you justify a data quality project? Normally you find a process that’s falling over and quite often, data quality will be a factor,” he said.

“Over the years, we’ve looked at ineffective truck rolls, returned bills, things like that … There’s often two or three data quality effects causing them.”

Prior to Telstra’s finance-led data governance program, data was managed by a number of Chief Data Officers, the last of whom was appointed in 2004.

Kortink managed aspects of data governance during Telstra’s IT transformation project, which was unveiled in 2005 and expected to rationalise legacy systems and deliver a new enterprise data warehouse for storing customer information.

He said the new enterprise data warehouse could absorb three of Telstra’s seven existing data warehouses within the next two years.

The telco was also two years into a “progressive exercise” to consolidate legacy databases into a master data management (MDM) system and integrate it with relevant systems.

Kortink told the conference that Telstra had about 240 systems that contained address data, and “about the same number of systems” with product data.

Although “traditional data warehouse architecture” called for a single warehouse and single business intelligence (BI) tool that all employees used to analyse data, Kortink said that model could be unrealistic for large organisations.

“The reality is if you try that approach, you’ll get people using other things [business intelligence tools] anyhow,” he said.

“If you’ve got a legacy environment like Telstra where we’ve got seven big data warehouses … we’re always going to have fairly chunky data warehouses and at some point it becomes a not very good business case to get rid of them.

“We’re working on the ideal template of one data warehouse and one BI tool. In reality, [we’ll have] multiple data warehouses and multiple BI tools.”

Kortink said the new, finance-led data governance program was “very effective” but noted that data governance needed to become a more permanent fixture within the organisation.

“It’s not a project, it’s a process,” he said. “You don’t say let’s run an HR project to manage our people or let’s run a finance project to manage our money.”

He urged conference attendees to take control of data governance, noting that if CIOs did not step up to the task, “no one else will, in most organisations”.

Source: http://www.itnews.com.au/News/290705,telstras-finance-division-tackles-bad-data.aspx

Apple’s productivity suite – Pages, Keynote and Numbers – have been available since the iPad’s 2010 launch, but now their comfortable positions near the top of the app productivity chart are in jeopardy because Microsoft Office is said to be wrestling its way into the App Store.

Previews dug out by The Daily of Microsoft Office for iPad suggest the ubiquitous software suite is indeed headed towards our favourite fruit-based glass rectangle. And while there are suggestions from the wider webosphere that such Office minors as Access and Outlook may also be bound for the App Store, we think not. We do, on the other hand, think tying the iPad-based versions in with Microsoft’s existing cloud suite – Office 365 – would make mighty good sense.

Early previews circulating the web show the Microsoft Office app with a Metro UI-style interface similar to Windows 8, which will suit the iPad’s touch-screen. And of course, we’ll expect versions to follow on Android tablets, plus of course the glut of Windows 8 slates 2012 promises to bring. We’ll get to work on a spreadsheet when we’ve got a few more details.

Source: http://www.crn.com.au/News/291127,microsoft-office-for-ipad-heading-for-the-app-store.aspx

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Microsoft isn’t only “re-imagining” its Windows software, it’s re-imagining the Windows logo.

The company on Friday unveiled the logo for the next generation of the company’s flagship operating system. It’s expected to be generally available later this year, and Microsoft has said it will debut a consumer preview version of the software on February 29 during Mobile World Congress 2012 in Barcelona.

Unlike the multi-color, flag-like graphic that has been a component of every Windows logo going back to Windows 3.1, the new logo is entirely one color (shown in light blue) with a simple four-pane window viewed at a slight angle.

“The Windows logo is a strong and widely recognised mark, but when we stepped back and analysed it, we realised an evolution of our logo would better reflect our Metro-style design principles and we also felt there was an opportunity to reconnect with some of the powerful characteristics of previous incarnations,” said Sam Moreau, principal director of user experience for Windows, in a blog post.

Moreau describes how early in the Windows 8 development process managers met with designers from the Pentagram design consulting firm to come up with the new logo. At one point designers asked why Windows was shown as a flag.

In the blog Moreau notes that logos for early editions of Windows did not use the wavy flag-like icon and the new logo is somewhat reminiscent of the graphic used for Windows 1.0.

“Microsoft and Windows are all about putting technology in people’s hands to empower them to find their own perspectives,” Moreau said. “And that is what the new logo was meant to be. We did less of a re-design and more to return it to its original meaning and bringing Windows back to its roots — re-imagining the Windows logo as just that — a window.

“With Windows 8, we approached the logo redesign with a few key goals on mind. We wanted the new logo to be both modern and classic by echoing the International Typographic Style (or Swiss design) that has been a great influence on our Metro style design philosophy,” he said. “Using bold flat colors and clean lines and shapes, the new logo has the characteristics of way-finding design systems seen in airports and subways,” Moreau said.

“It was important that the new logo carries our Metro principle of being ‘Authentically Digital.’ By that, we mean it does not try to emulate faux-industrial design characteristics such as materiality (glass, wood, plastic, etc.). It has motion — aligning with the fast and fluid style you’ll find throughout Windows 8.

“Our final goal was for the new logo to be humble, yet confident. Welcoming you in with a slight tilt in perspective and when you change your color, the logo changes to reflect you. It is a ‘Personal’ Computer after all,” Moreau said.

Reaction to the new logo has been decidedly mixed, judging by the comments to Moreau’s blog.

“Wow. Big change, but I think it accurately reflects how Microsoft is attempting to modernise their brands. I like the new design, and I think it’ll look great on Windows 8, but the classic 90s logo is still my favorite. I’m hoping we’ll see it debut on the 29th,” said a commenter.

But not everyone agrees.

“I’m a fan of Windows. I’m a HUGE fan of Windows 8. But this, guys, is epic failure. Why not just make it like the start button in the [Windows 8 developer preview], maybe in one color, but this… this is disappointing,” said another.

Source: http://www.crn.com.au/News/290879,microsoft-unveils-windows-8-logo.aspx

In this age of HD YouTube videos and OS updates totaling hundred of MBs, it’s sometimes easy to forget that somewhere out there are dial-up users.

Interesting to note then, that in Microsoft’s IE test lab – which emulates DSL, cable modems, high bandwidth WAN and 4G speeds – they’ve also bothered with lowly 56K modems.

The company has posted a blog entry outlining IE testing, which includes a “mini-Internet” constructed for testing purposes. The aim is to try and make sure the browser runs “consistently fast across all classes of computer hardware.” This network includes more than 120 computers, ranging from X64 desktops to an Atom N270 1.6Ghz netbook.

An estimated 5% of Australia’s 6.7 million households with the Internet are still using dial-up, according to official estimates.

Source: http://www.crn.com.au/News/290728,microsoft-is-still-testing-ie-for-56k-modems.aspx

Some 75,000 square feet of “raised floor space” that could be occupied by IT systems and networking racks is already available, and top multinational companies including IBM and Hewlett-Packard have signed up as customers, said H.S. Bedi, chairman and managing director of Tulip Telecom, the parent company, in a phone interview on Tuesday.

IBM was the design consultant for the data center which, has a power usage effectiveness of 1.5., Bedi said. PUE measures the energy efficiency of a data center by dividing the total power consumption of the data center, including cooling and lighting systems, by the power consumption of IT systems.

Tulip’s strategy is to sign up large system integrators and service providers which in turn sell the data center services to businesses and other customers, said Ravikant Sharma, an analyst at IDC in India.

Tulip will benefit from economies of scale, as other third-party data centers in India are typically smaller, with up to 175,000 square feet of area, Sharma said.

The data center is already attracting both local businesses and foreign companies that have operations in the country. Customers in the Middle East and South East Asia are also looking to set up data recovery centers at the Tulip Data City, Bedi said.

Indian data center capacity is poised to touch 6.6 million square feet by 2016, with service providers driving majority of the growth, Gartner said in November. The data center colocation and hosting market in India is estimated to reach US$609 million this year and $1.3 billion in 2016, according to the research firm.

Tulip will increase the raised floor space as the orders come in. It has already sold 16 percent of the raised floor space and by March next year it will have sold about 25 percent of the space. It hopes to achieve full capacity of 400,000 raised floor space in less than two years.

Source: http://www.arnnet.com.au/article/414627/large_data_center_coming_india_regional_demand_booms/

US startup Nicira came out of ‘stealth mode’ on Monday, unveiling a virtualisation platform that promises to do for networks what VMware did for servers and computing.

The Palo Alto-based company launched its Network Virtualisation Platform (NVP), a product set that sits at the edge of an IP network and “decouples” network processes from the underlying hardware.

In the same way that server virtualisation recast servers as general capacity that could be provisioned with little fuss, NVP permits the physical network to be thought of as capacity, leaving virtual networks and the processes running on them free to be multiplied or moved anywhere within a data centre or between data centres.

Some comparisons can be drawn between server and network virtualisation, but they are completely different, says one of Nicira’s co-founders, Martin Casado whose research led to the creation of OpenFlow and Software-Defined Networking.

While virtualised servers are “self-contained” in that they do not need to deal with different configurations or “states”, networks can be configured in a variety of ways. In a virtualised networking environment, inconsistent states introduce the risk of packets being carried along a path and delivered to the wrong location, Casado explains in his personal blog.

Casado said NVP will give service providers the tools to move enterprise applications more quickly to the cloud by allowing them to maintain their existing IP configurations.

NVP has already been deployed at some major cloud operations, including Rackspace, eBay, AT&T and Japanese telco, NTT. Monday’s launch signalled the technology is ready to help enterprise address network constraints in private cloud computing programs.

The major benefit Nicira promises is to cut the time it takes to deliver a network, which can be weeks, but also offers the ability to deliver physical network attributes such as Quality of Service (QoS), and tiered services via virtual ports that support Layer 2 to Layer 7 services.

The two key pieces to Nicira’s offering include Open vSwitch – switch software that forms the edge of virtualised network devices, and the NVP Controller Cluster, which us used to manage virtualised network components and connections.

“Network virtualisation is the biggest change to networking in 25 years,” claimed Stephen Mullaney, CEO of Nicira.

“NVP provides the final pivotal piece to cloud computing, the most transformational change to IT in a generation. And the largest most forward-thinking cloud providers are laser-focused on operations and economics, the two benefits Nicira delivers.”

The company has also attracted the financial backing of VMware co-founder Diane Green and several well known technology venture capitalists.

Source: http://www.crn.com.au/News/289476,nicira-virtualises-the-network.aspx

Cisco has launched a replacement program for one of its B-series Unified Computing System (UCS) blade servers after revealing a faulty transistor could cause the unit to overheat and damage nearby blades.

In a field notice issued last week, Cisco said it was contacting customers to replace the transistor in its UCS B440 Blade Servers with modified hardware.

The notice warned that failure of the server’s metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) can cause it to overheat and emit a flash that could lead to “complete board failure”.

“In extreme circumstances it could affect the other blades in the chassis by disrupting power flow,” it reported.

Efforts to contact customers began after a thermal incident occurred at a customer site. It did not say when that incident occurred. However a firmware update was released in July last year in response to an incident that occurred at one customer site.

A second incident triggered modification of the hardware and the replacement program.

Cisco told CRN.com the thermal event had occurred at two customer sites, adding that it was “proactively managing this situation” by keeping customers informed of when the modified hardware became available.

“A hardware replacement program has been launched and a modified UCS B440 Blade Server will be announced when it becomes available,” Cisco said in the notice.

It was also discussing the option of alternative UCS solutions for customers.

No other UCS hardware was affected, Cisco reported.

Cisco has provided workaround details that will help minimise the risk of damage if a transistor fails, including upgrading to the latest UCS Blade Management Controller Software.

Source: http://www.crn.com.au/News/289562,cisco-to-replace-sparky-blade-server.aspx