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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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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.

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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.

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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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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.

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In that document the ABS notes that IBM which was awarded the contract after a limited tender had indicated that the solution it proposed would be “highly resistant to web application security attacks”, including DDoS attacks. That proved not to be the case.

While the special advisor to the Prime Minister on cyber security, Alastair MacGibbon, has yet to release his full report into the failure, in a submission to the Senate Inquiry he noted that it was the ABS which made the decision to shut down the website following a series of DDoS attacks. He has indicated publicly that the DDoS attacks were relatively small and notes in the submission that such attacks are common within Government and routinely dealt with.

The ABS however claims that IBM failed to properly implement its geoblocking security solution to reduce the impact of overseas attempts to crash the system.

Vice chairman of the Australian Privacy Foundation, David Vaile, characterises the failure somewhat differently; “You retain someone to provide a cheap open-top ute service to go round Melbourne and collect some ‘new oil’ [data] in a bath for you. When the weather predictably starts to sprinkle like it always does, you suddenly wish you’d ordered the proper ute with a roof like you’d been offered, but you can only pull a tarp over and decide not to do the full run, hoping it won’t really rain despite the gathering clouds.

“When the wheels start to go wobbly as you hit a bump turning a corner, their driver gets jumpy and says ‘that blinking indicator light looks like we’re leaking’; so you all jump out and run home, leaving the motor running.

“The rain comes down but luckily you aren’t there any more, just a growing crowd of people bringing their oil to the ute, repeatedly waiting 15 minutes and trying again, like your flashing sign keeps on saying to, until they eventually just give up.”

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Analysis conducted on behalf of the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner found that 71 percent of devices and services used by Australians don’t have an adequate privacy policy.

In addition 69 percent of organisations failed to tell customers how to delete information from the device, 38 percent didn’t readily provide contact details for customers with concerns, and 91 percent didn’t recommend consumers customise their privacy settings.

The report focusses on consumer-facing systems such as movie streaming systems, fitness bands, home appliances and toys rather than the sort of industrial IoT devices being deployed to manage smart buildings, smart factories and smart cities. Arguably those more industrial IoT devices measure inanimate entities and won’t need privacy policies.

One school of thought argues that consumer devices – smart watches for example – aren’t IoT at all, that they are just a brand of consumer tech. But they do connect via the internet and are things – so it’s a question of semantics, and the data collected through them can integrate with broader networks – for example uploading location or payments data that could be used to triangulate all manner of personal insights. Without adequate privacy protection, consumer rights could be eroded.

And the spread of consumer tech is accelerating. Earlier this month Telsyte released its Australian Smartphone and Wearable Devices study which showed smart watch sales leapt 89 percent in the first half of the year compared to the similar period of 2015. Overall more than a million smart wearables were sold, with killer apps proving to be fitness and payments related.

Given the quantity of personal data involved with either of those applications, privacy should be a priority concern for most consumers.

According to Australian Privacy Commissioner, Timothy Pilgrim, “The Internet of Things allows for some great products and entertainment, but many of us have adopted this technology into our everyday lives without considering how much of our personal information is being captured or what happens to that information. Remember, for an Internet of Things device to work for you it needs to know about you, so you should know what information is being collected and where it is going. I encourage all Australians to look for privacy policies before you decide to use a device, and ensure you are comfortable with what information is being collected and how it is being managed.”

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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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When the Feds settled on Drupal for content management through its govCMS platform, Drupal 7 was the most recent version of the platform available – Drupal 8 was released last year. So far 79 Government websites have been developed using Acquia’s platform, with a further 19 under construction. In all 40 Agencies have opted in.

They are understood to represent about 20 percent of the overall Government website inventory.

Adam Malone, Acquia senior solutions architect, said that in the months since Drupal 8 was first released it has matured, and would now offer a more object oriented framework and multilingual functions for agencies. This month’s release of a new version of Acquia’s Cloud Site Factory, which can support multiple versions of Drupal simultaneously, will be useful if the Government does opt in the future to promote Drupal 8.

And promote is all it can do; use of the govCMS is not mandated, though it has been supported by the Digital Transformation Office which is charged with supporting agencies’ innovation agendas.

Beyond the Federal Government, the new version of Cloud Site Factory could also be of interest to multinational corporations seeking to develop omnichannel retail solutions as it can support multiple regions, brands and development teams from within a single governance framework.

Leveraging Acquia’s cloud based Content Hub, it’s also possible to manage content from multiple silos, including WordPress or Adobe content silos. Law firm Herbert Smith Freehills for example has adopted this approach to syndicate content across its Sydney, London and Hong Kong firms according to Sowden.

Synchronising websites and online brands is a significant challenge for many organisations; Acquia cites Forrester Research analysis from last year which suggests that globally enterprises manage an average of 268 customer-facing websites and that large enterprises have as many as 10,000 content creators using their digital asset management system. Having a single governance framework should at least help with consistency.

Asked about recent reports that Drupal and other content management systems were being used as attack vectors to launch cyberattacks against companies, Malone said he was not aware of a rise in attack successes, and that the open source nature of the platform should in any case ensure that any vulnerabilities were quickly identified and patched.

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While the market did open for a brief period on Monday, participants reported having trouble accessing the trading platform, ASX Trade. The ASX limited operations to one part of the market, then opened the market entirely for a period, before shutting down the system and finally deciding to close early.

A statement issued late Tuesday night indicated that the ASX was scheduled to open as normal on Tuesday with closing prices deemed as the last traded on the ASX indicating that the integrity of the data held by the Exchange remains intact.

The ASX is mid-way through a five year refresh of legacy systems under the leadership of CIO Tim Thurman. Just last month Thurman spoke at a media conference to explain that the ASX was one of the few international exchanges that was vertically integrated and had developed a complex web of systems involving hundreds of customised APIs to integrate all of those systems.

It is well on the way to streamlining the situation, and has also embraced a DevOps approach to innovation initiatives and started to migrate some applications to the Amazon cloud – all of which would once have been unthinkable in what has traditionally been a highly conservative IT shop. That is no longer the case, however, and the organisation is now also developing a blockchain-based replacement for the CHESS settlement platform with New York Based Digital Asset Holdings in which it has taken a multimillion dollar stake.

The ASX has also invested in ensuring its system is as secure as possible and has had its platform tested by market regulator ASIC. Amanda Harkness, group general counsel and head of corporate affairs for the ASX, spoke at length last week at the SINET61 Summit about the programmes that the Exchange has in place to protect it from external attack and to ensure the resilience of the market.

Yesterday proved, however, that it can all still be undone by faulty hardware.

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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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Rackspace, which is in the process of being acquired by a private equity business, found that four out of five Australian survey respondents had achieved their business goals expected from a migration to the cloud. Just 58 percent had done that in the UK.

Also, 37 percent of Australian migrations were completed in less than three months. In the UK only five percent managed that.

Angus Dorney, general manager and director at Rackspace, said that in his experience, though Australians were enthusiastic about cloud computing, most had adopted a “lift and shift” approach – transferring existing workloads to the cloud without much change. That, he said, did not deliver the deep transformational benefits that might be possible if solutions were optimised to take advantage of the cloud, but would deliver basic business benefits such as cost reductions.

That, he said, might explain the significant gap between Australian and UK cloud users.

“There are lots of ways of migrating to cloud. Lift and shift or a complete transformation and re-engineering. A lot of Australian organisations are probably doing the former,” he said. “For more mature organisations, flexibility and agility is where the real benefits lie.”

Dorney added, though, that two thirds of Australian cloud users were already using between two and five different cloud services, so there is clearly no lack of appetite. He also said that instead of cloud migrations continuing to focus on web facing applications, there was mounting evidence that Australian companies were now shifting back office business critical services to the cloud – but still often as a lift and shift migration.

Cloud migration in Australia continues to be led by the private sector, said Dorney, though there was a growing appetite to use the cloud in the public sector.

Dorney declined to comment on the implications of the decision to take Rackspace private by selling the company’s shares to Apollo Global Management. The transaction, which values Rackspace at $US4.3 billion, has however been characterised as one intended to allow it to more flexibly invest in multi cloud capabilities while divesting of non-core business units.

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Sinet61 is the newly formed local chapter of a global community of interest formed to share information and insight about information security.

Meyerriecks said that in the past, the way to make a system resilient was to harden its perimeters. She acknowledged that this was no longer possible and instead said the most successful approach is to “Change your configuration management every 20 days, plus or minus 5 days, to change the attack surface.”

That, she said, was the most effective way to counter attempts at cyber-attacks, and was an approach taken by the world’s major data centres and cloud vendors. She did however acknowledge that, “Every CIO in the place gets nervous about this.”

While changing systems configuration so regularly may work for cloud computing vendors, it might prove beyond the scope of most enterprise CIOs.  Meyerriecks said, however, that there were additional strategies that could help tackle the challenge, such as developing a technical and skilled workforce with experience in security and collaborating with other organisations to share information about security challenges.

One of the proposals of the Government’s $230 million information security action plan is to build an online threat sharing portal to facilitate exactly that sorts of collaboration, and speakers at the conference said that backchannels which shared threat information within a sector were already being leveraged.

Another element of the Government’s cyber action plan is to support a more vibrant local security industry. Adrian Turner is CEO of Data 61 and joint chair of the Cyber Security Industry Growth Centre. He said that the organisation had submitted its business plan to Government and expected to formally get underway in the next few weeks with the twin goals of promoting security and creating a vibrant domestic, but globally competitive industry.

Alastair MacGibbon, special advisor to the PM on cyber security told Summit delegates that while Australian enterprise and Government stood to benefit from sustained digital innovation, it brought with it “complex threats and complex challenges.”

MacGibbon has spent the last month examining the causes of the Census site failure and confirmed to delegates that investigation had revealed that there had been some relatively small distributed denial of service attacks which had led to the Bureau of Statistics deciding to close down the site.

He said that the “Impact in terms of trust and confidence will last a significant period. That comparatively small DDoS will have lasting impact on Government and there is a lot to learn (from it) for the business community.”

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One of the advantages in this deal is that Michael Harte, the former CIO of Commbank, who led the bank’s core systems transformation project and was on deck when the bank launched its smartphone app (then called Kaching!) is now chief operations and technology officer of Barclays. He knows intimately what’s under the hood at both banks.

More importantly the deal is clear evidence of the big banks taking on fintech disruptors at their own game. According to Kelly Bayer Rosmarin, group executive of institutional banking and markets at Commbank; “This demonstrates the power of two influential global organisations collaborating to deliver world-firsts in financial services innovation.”

The bank has also opened an innovation lab in London, adding to two others in Sydney and Hong Kong.

Barclays group COO Paul Compton said that this was the first time that Pingit would be used for two way cross border payments. “Our partnership with CBA demonstrates how large institutions can and should work together to provide innovative solutions that benefit both customers, and the banking industry as a whole.”

While clearly focused at the consumer end of the market, these sort of initiatives could develop into a competitor for online funds transfer firms such as OzForex (now OFX). Barclays Pingit for example can already be used to send funds to 33 countries in Europe, Botswana, Ghana, India, Kenya and Mauritius. These services have been launched initially fee-free – though it’s not clear if and when that might change.

The Barclays-Commbank announcement is at this stage little more than a statement of intent that the service will be available by the end of the year. What fees are involved, or whether there is also an initial fee-free period, is yet to be revealed.

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Keynote speakers lined up for the event include David Thodey, formerly the head of Telstra and now chairman of CSIRO and Jobs NSW who will talk about Australia’s innovation challenge. That challenge, it seems, is growing, as despite Government initiatives to promote innovation, the World Economic Forum this year rated Australia as 16th in terms of its success in using ICT to transform businesses. That’s down from 14^th rank the year before.

Other keynote speakers include Dr Helen Papagiannis, an augmented reality specialist – plenty of Pokemon references no doubt – and Richard de Crespigny, who safely piloted QF32 to Singapore’s Changi Airport after engine failure. He’ll speak on leadership, communication, teamwork and crisis management. Gus Balbontin a former CTO of Lonely Planet, will discuss the CIO challenge; and Peter Hinssen will share his experience of disruptive innovation.

Gartner has selected de Crespigny to kick off the event, so, interestingly lessons from disaster will be the first message for this year’s crop of around 1,500 delegates including around 500 CIOs.

After copping plenty of flak last year for failing to have many women speakers (apart from a handful of its own analysts) Gartner has addressed the issue this year with both a female keynoter and CIO presenting.

CIO headliners include Randall Brugeaud, CIO of Immigration and Border protection, Sabrina Walsh CIO of the Western Sydney Local Health District and former Westpac-er Sarv Girn, now CIO of Australia’s Reserve Bank.

Gartner is also running a couple of ‘contract negotiation clinics’ for Oracle and SAP users.

One of the challenges for anyone attending a Gartner event is navigating the content – this year’s six streams will be no different. However, the analyst has this year provided four curated options for CIOs at different stages of their career – for the aspiring CIO, the new CIO, the strategic operations CIO and the business strategist CIO.

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