Australian buyers will be among the first to get their hands on Apple’s new iPad tomorrow.

The consumer giant yesterday announced the latest iteration of its flagship tablet will go on sale in all Apple stores across Australia on Friday, and eight countries including the US and UK at 8am March 16.

The new iPad will arrive in New Zealand and several European countries from March 23.

Telstra will open its George St, Sydney and Bourke St, Melbourne stores at midnight tonight to new iPad customers. It will also retail the device through its Business Centres from 8am tomorrow morning.

Telstra spokesperson Rod Bruen told CRN this was the second midnight opening for the telco, having previously opened its doors early for the iPhone 4.

“We’re very excited and there’s customer demand for it,” he said. “There’s lots of interest around, and there’s a buzz already today at our George St store.”

Optus and Vodafone have confirmed they will stock the iPad from tomorrow morning on various plans. Optus’s new iPad web page is yet to go live, but plans range from $19.95 p/m to $49.95 p/m.

PC World reports the iPad will also retail through Dick Smith, Big W, JB Hi-Fi and Target alongside Apple’s online store. The Australian has reported Big W will also open three stores at midnight- one city store in Melbourne, as well two locations over 40km out of their respective cities- Rouse Hill, Sydney, and Fountain Gate, Melbourne.

Customers have been able to pre-order the new iPad online since its launch on 8th March, though Apple yesterday confirmed pre-orders had sold out. Those who ordered the tablet after the March 8 announcement will be forced to wait an extra week for delivery.

Apple will offer new iPad customers an in-store personal setup service free of charge.

The tablet comes in black and white, with the wi-fi model priced at $539 outright for 16GB, $649 for 32GB and $759 for 64GB. For wi-fi + 4G the 16GB will retail for $679, the 32GB $789 and 64GB $899.

The original iPad 2 will continue to be sold alongside the new iPad and has had its price slashed down to $429 for the 16GB wi-fi model and $569 for wi-fi + 3G.

Source: http://www.crn.com.au/News/293817,aussies-get-first-batch-of-new-ipads.aspx

Microsoft has suffered an outage of its Exchange Online hosted email service that impacted users in the Asia Pacific region.

The issue was confirmed at 9.15am Sydney time from an official Twitter feed. Reports of issue resolution started around 40 minutes later and full restoration was confirmed by 11.15am.

“Investigating Exchange Online issue in APAC,” Microsoft posted on its Office365 Twitter account.

“Some will not be able to connect to email. Resolving ASAP.”

Microsoft urged users to check the Office365 service status dashboard for updates. The dashboard was available to registered Office365 users only.

However, several users including a Sydney-based systems integrator and an Adelaide-based SharePoint consultant noted the status did not show there was an outage.

Microsoft’s primary Australian Office365 reseller Telstra referred questions on the outage to Microsoft.

A Microsoft Australia spokesman declined to comment, referring users to look at the internal dashboard.

Office365 last suffered a major outage in September last year that took the service offline for four hours. It was later attributed to a DNS issue.

Source: http://www.crn.com.au/News/293963,microsoft-suffers-exchange-online-outage.aspx

Aside from being a modern, clean and professional data centre in a discreet location that satisfies our requirement for geographic separation between our data centre and our head office, Digital Sense were able to provide many additional value-added services that enable Ezidebit to control and access our business-critical infrastructure in any event. It’s clear from the outset that their Data Centre has been designed in great detail with redundancy and security in mind.

As a CIO it’s imperative that my staff can manage the environment unimpeded, and Digital Sense’s real-time monitoring, and secure, logged 24/7 self-serve access to the site ensures that my team can manage and access our environment around the clock without delay.

Throughout the selection, engagement and implementation of our services, the Digital Sense staff have been available and professional, supporting us at every stage. Nothing that we’ve asked of Digital Sense has been too difficult for them and we have always received prompt and friendly responses. Their adherence to their own internal process reassures me that the security and availability of our own service won’t be compromised by shortcuts or oversights.

I’m looking forward to our continued relationship with Digital Sense, knowing that they are responsive enough to keep up with our growing business needs, yet professional and stable enough to continue to meet their first class service levels to support our business both now and well into the future. Our choice in a Data Centre partner was not one that was taken lightly, as migrating Data Centres is a large and expensive project for any business, and I’m confident that our choice in Digital Sense will ensure that we will not need to consider repeating that migration for many years to come.

Jason Turnbull
Chief Information Officer
Ezidebit Pty Ltd

Microsoft has unveiled its consumer preview of the Windows 8 operating system together with a new tool to configure perhipherals to take advantage of new OS features.

The preview also marked the “beta opening” of the Windows Store where apps from third-party developers and Microsoft would be available free of charge.

Consumers who download the Windows 8 preview will have the option to sign on with a Microsoft account to take advantage of cloud services that could operate across a Windows PC/Windows Phone environment.

The operating system release also comes with Internet Explorer 10 platform preview 5, which uses hardware acceleration for better web performance, Microsoft said.

Microsoft warned in a blog post, however, that the preview is not production software and therefore some caution should be taken before it is installed by non-technical users.

“The Windows 8 Consumer Preview is just that: a preview of what’s to come,” Windows team member Kent Walter said.

“It represents a work in progress, and some things will change before the final release. This means you’ll encounter some hiccups and bugs.

“If you’re used to running prerelease (beta) software, you’re OK with a little troubleshooting, and you don’t mind doing a few technical tasks here and there, then you’ll probably be OK giving the Windows 8 Consumer Preview a spin.

“If a list of hardware specs is a little overwhelming for you, or you’re not sure what you’d do if something unexpected happened, this might not be the time to dive in.”

As with previous OS previews, Microsoft would not be offering official user support for those that install the operating system.

However, users were encouraged to report bugs and issues and could find answers or workarounds from other system testers on Microsoft forums.

Hardware specs

To coincide with the preview, Microsoft has released detailed hardware specifications to show users what is required to take advantage of the operating system on PCs and – perhaps more importantly – on touchscreen devices.

Microsoft makes it clear that Metro style apps require a minimum screen resolution of 1024×768 – any less and users will see only an error message.

Metro is the lightweight “app centric” Windows Phone 7 tile-style graphical user interface.

Microsoft said that the Windows 8 preview is supported on “a number of existing Windows 7 touch devices”; however, it warned that the new operating system “places a greater demand on a high quality experience than could have been foreseen when manufacturers were developing hardware for Windows 7″.

“Our data is showing that a vast majority of Windows 7 touchscreens will perform well for Windows 8,” the company said in a blog post.

“This means that touch drivers continue to load, and you’ll be able to perform basic touch interactions with a reasonable degree of success.”

Tablets confirmed by Microsoft to work include the HP Elitebook 2760p convertible and ASUS EP121 tablet (however, neither has the screen resolution to use Snap, a feature of Windows 8 that allows users to multi-task by running two apps side-by-side in the screen real estate).

Other devices that work include the Samsung Series 7 slate, Lenovo x220t convertible and Dell Inspiron Duo convertible devices.

In a separate blog post, Microsoft warned that the compatibility of the tablet device would depend on the number of “simultaneous touchpoints” it supported.

“If you want to use touch, you’ll need a multitouch-capable laptop, tablet, or display,” the firm said.

“Windows 8 supports up to five simultaneous touch points, so if your hardware doesn’t, you may find typing on the onscreen keyboard and using certain controls more of a challenge.”

For general PCs, the preview requires a minimum 1 GHz processor, 1-2 GB RAM, 16-20GB hard disk space and a DirectX 9 graphics device.

Microsoft noted that some features would require tinkering in BIOS settings or specific drivers to operate. More information is available here.

Virtual machine tests?

Microsoft issued an advisory against running the consumer preview in a virtualised environment for test purposes.

“Our recommendation for the Consumer Preview is to run it natively on hardware if you intend to run Windows 8 on hardware when the product is final,” Microsoft said.

“Some of you will run virtualised environments for enterprise workloads or specialised purposes, but we strongly recommend that you experience Windows 8 on hardware, as it was designed to run for the majority of consumer experiences.”

The company said that running the OS on hardware would allow it to take advantage of hardware acceleration for graphics.

“If you do run in a VM, which is supported as expected, please be sure your screen size meets the minimum requirements,” the company said.

Configuring peripherals

Coinciding with the Windows 8 preview is the release of Microsoft Device Center, a beta tool that allows users to remap their mouse or keyboard using IntelliPoint or IntelliType technology respectively to take advantage of the new operating system.

Microsoft also said it would be updating its Touch Mouse peripheral to work natively with Windows 8 – though availability would not come in time for preview users.

Source: http://www.crn.com.au/News/292178,windows-8-consumer-preview-released.aspx

IBM is gearing up to unveil a new line of IT systems that combine hardware and software in preintegrated configurations that promise high levels of scalability and performance.

But the company isn’t saying much more than that about the products, which are slated to debut in an April 11 event.

IBM will launch the “new family of expert integrated systems” in events scheduled for April 11 in New York, London, Sao Paulo, Mumbai and Beijing, said Rod Adkins, senior vice president of the IBM Systems and Technology Group, at the IBM PartnerWorld Leadership Conference in New Orleans Tuesday.

The new systems will offer “true integration — not packaging, but true integration by design,” Adkins said, and will provide high levels of performance and scalability, and lower cost of operations.

Adkins declined to say more about the new products. Other IBM executives alluded to the coming announcement in speeches and interviews throughout the day but did not divulge any additional details.

Adkins did say that prelaunch training would be available for partners, indicating that the channel will play a role in selling the new systems.

Selling more complete, higher-value systems that combine IBM hardware and software has been the overriding theme at the PartnerWorld conference. Last Tuesday IBM rolled out financial incentives for reseller partners to develop and sell such integrated systems.

IBM may be responding to competition from Oracle, which has been selling what it calls “engineered systems” that combine Sun Microsystems servers with Oracle middleware and database software. Oracle argues that such complete hardware/software systems, such as its Oracle Exadata Database Machine, offer better efficiency and performance than systems cobbled together by IT departments.

Source: http://www.crn.com.au/News/292181,ibm-preps-integrated-hardwaresoftware-systems.aspx

Network engineers have speculated router configuration and route limiting procedures on Telstra equipment were to blame for network outages that affected millions of services yesterday.

Seen as one of Australia’s worst in recent years, the 35-minute outage saw Telstra routers incorrectly redirect traffic from its own subscribers as well as those of its wholesale customers through ISP Dodo’s routers and to effective dead-ends.

Millions were affected on Telstra’s domestic networks as well as those operated by iiNet, Optus, the four major banks and multiple large enterprises.

NBN Co, also a peering partner on the affected router, did not respond to questions at time of writing.

Dodo CEO Larry Kestelman confirmed the outage was the result of “a hardware issue with a Cisco border router” on his company’s network which attempted to change the way it routed traffic for its subscribers to the internet.

It is thought Dodo effectively “advertised the entire internet”, made up of approximately 400,000 routing prefixes. These were accepted by Dodo’s bandwidth wholesaler, Telstra, and propagated to all other Telstra customers accessing the internet through the telco’s AS1221 peering exchange.

One observer, Michael Keating, explained that “any traffic destined to go overseas, was in fact effectively being routed back towards Dodo”.

“This meant that Telstra lost the ability to communicate data overseas, the local network became saturated with data and became unstable, and anyone using Telstra for international capacity suddenly stopped working,” he said.

Dodo’s Kestelman yesterday said that, “in normal circumstances, this would not result in a network outage.

“However, it appears that these routes were accepted by Telstra and propagated to Telstra’s downstream customers rather than Telstra simply filtering the routes.

“This caused major issues for Telstra and its customers which should have been avoided.”

Though much of the blame has been laid on Dodo’s network issues yesterday, network engineers told iTnews that some of the blame should be laid with Telstra for failing to filter or limit the number of routes Dodo purported to provide for access to the internet.

Engineers said that, in a best practice situation, Telstra would limit the number of prefixes Dodo advertised to the network through a configuration feature available on Cisco and other routers for more than ten years.

Bad practice

Geoff Huston, chief scientist at the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC), said Telstra used to employ prefix filters but he could not ascertain whether they were still in use on any of the routes.

Recent practice in Telstra and other Australian carriers had been to rely on administrative processes and “trust” to implement the Border Gateway Protocol, the underlying technology that led to yesterday’s issues.

“I suspect that we’re not as careful as we should be with the use of routing databases – in fact Australia is pretty bad in its use of routing databases,” he said.

“Certainly ten years ago, we didn’t use customer-level filters. Something like Dodo couldn’t have happened then.”

Vocus managing director James Spenceley said such filters are still common practice among other Australian carriers but seemed not to be in use, at least in Dodo’s case.

“Filtering has been absolutely mandatory best practice since the 90s,” he said. “We’ve all invested our time and money to make sure we can do it.”

A post-incident report is expected from Dodo and Telstra in coming days, likely revealing the extent to which either party could be allayed the blame for the outage and whether any changes to administrative processes would be recommended to avoid future repeats.

A Telstra spokesman confirmed “steps were taken [Thursday] to add additional protection to our core network.

“A full review of Telstra’s network protection mechanisms is being undertaken,” he said.

Some of the service providers affected by yesterday’s outage said they would look to diversify peering arrangements in future to minimise the impact on their respective customer bases.

Huston warned Australian providers to become more practised in routing databases in the meantime.

“Maybe we’d all be better off at protecting ourselves from these kinds of slip-ups which, let’s face it, always will happen sooner or later,” he said.

Update: Added updated Telstra statement and fixed minor inaccuracies.

Source: http://www.crn.com.au/News/291678,telstra-outage-falls-to-procedural-error.aspx

Systems integrator Dimension Data has launched a suite of services designed to take the heavy lifting out of designing, deploying and managing public, private and hybrid cloud solutions for the enterprise.

Peter Prowse, general manager of DiData Australia’s data centre solutions, told CRN the company would compete against the likes of Google, Microsoft and Amazon bringing to market the message that its solutions were simpler to deploy and more flexible.

Last week’s launch of the service in Australia followed earlier launches in the US and Amsterdam. Prowse said the service would go live in South Africa and South East Asia in the next 60 days, adding so far DiData had signed up “in the 10′s” of customers.

He said DiData’s Cloud Solutions Suite had a powerful point of differentiation in the market in that it was able to cater to customers wanting “the ability to burst through to the public cloud”.

It’s for this reason that DiData ruled out any risk the service would compete head on with Azure, Microsoft’s cloud services platform to which the South African integrator is already aligned as a premier partner.

“There would be no competition at all,” Peter Menadue, DiData’s group general manager for Microsoft solutions said.

He said DiData was largely focussed on provisioning private cloud solutions for enterprise customers with options to augment with public services, while Microsoft’s strategy with Azure was almost 100 percent based around a public cloud offering.

“A key target for us is the enterprise and the private cloud is very important to them,” Menadue said.

“Microsoft offers a very large scale / public cloud out of a few data centres; they don’t deliver on-premise or supplement with hosting services like us.”

DiData also unveiled its Managed Cloud Platform (MCP) delivery platform for its range of cloud services as well as the Data CloudControl cloud management system for the automation of provisioning, orchestration, administration and billing.

The company confirmed that ac3 (the Australian Centre for Advanced Computing and Communications) had signed on as its first Managed Cloud Platform customer in Australia.

Betting large

DiData is big on strong enterprise demand for cloud services. Mid-last year the company created the global Dimension Data Cloud Solutions Business Unit, promoting former DiData Australia managing director Steve Nola as head.

It also completed its takeover of merged Sydney-based hosting companies BlueFire and Netforce. Six months earlier it bought respected Californian cloud and hosting services provider OpSource. The year before DiData was itself acquired by Japanese telecommunications giant NTT in a transaction valued at around $3.7 billion, creating a potential cloud powerhouse with a massive global customer base and a sprawling IT and telecommunications infrastructure.

“Our clients realise the transformational potential of cloud computing, whether it’s moving into new markets, launching new products, or improving IT efficiency,“ Nola said in a statement issued by DiData. “They’re also aware that migrating to the cloud is complex, with significant implications to their business across operations and IT. Our cloud services are designed to help clients reduce cost, move faster and manage risk effectively.”

DiData’s offerings include advisory and consulting services to help customers better understand issues such as cloud readiness, governance, IT optimisation, data centre consolidation and technology architecture. Cloud integration services would help companies mesh traditional infrastructures with the various cloud topologies.

Compute-as-a-service (CaaS) offers virtual servers and storage services in both private and public environments, with 24/7 help desk services and an online community support portal complimenting the latter. Customers are also offered a range of other services including managed hosting, managed services (patch management, device configuration and backup).

In addition, DiData offers what it calls advanced value-added cloud services, which includes cloud-based backup and disaster recovery on the company’s MCP offering.

Source: http://www.crn.com.au/News/291533,didata-launches-global-cloud-program.aspx

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