Ann Steward

Australian Government Chief Information Officer

This year will be a watershed year for ICT in the public sector, both in Canberra and more broadly throughout the country. The implementation of the ICT Reform Program and a greater emphasis on coordinated procurement will drive increased efficiency, collaboration and standardisation throughout government. The depth and breadth of collaboration between levels of government is also likely to increase, building on the strong base established by decisions at the recent meeting of the Online and Communications Council.

Addressing the ICT skills shortage will be a priority, with a greater focus on workforce planning and skills development within the APS. We will continue to build on initiatives such as the APS Apprenticeship and Cadetship programs to develop the ICT skills base, benefiting government, industry and the economy as a whole.

Sustainability will be a critical driver of ICT policy. Development of a whole-of-government data centre strategy will provide a great opportunity to get started on the road to virtualisation data centre demand will be driven by kilowatts, not square metres.

More broadly the ICT sector will continue to consolidate and look for innovation, driven by the need to reduce costs and improve margins. Cloud computing and open source technologies will move closer to providing real options for corporations and governments.

Small, mobile technologies will become the tools of choice for business and governments, and the full potential of IPV6 to transform business and the business of government will become more evident throughout 2009.

www.finance.gov.au/agimo/

Kevin Muller

IDC managing director, Pacific region

The global economy heavily influences predictions for 2009 across the Asia-Pacific region with all sectors of the ICT market set to feel the implications of the global slowdown. But the Asia-Pacific region still presents great opportunities, as emerging economies and technologies continue to pave the way. While most businesses will need to rethink their strategies, there will still be pockets of opportunity that will grow as the Asia-Pacific region bounces back. Key developments include:

1. Asia-Pacific IT spending growth will bounce back quickly.

2. Government spending will drive IT value optimisation and infrastructure development.

3. Cloud computing will grow despite and because of the economy.

4. Economic pressure to keep customers will accelerate the emergence of next-generation customer care.

5. Major players will look to the Asia-Pacific region for acquisitions, as the enterprise search market accelerates.

6. Green will become sustainable in the context of greater cost reduction.

7. The market slowdown will force many telecoms operators to rethink their strategies.

8. Enterprises will revisit the managed data centre model to help drive down costs.

9. Thin clients will ride the wave of cost-cutting and desktop virtualisation.

10. The economy and mini-notebooks will challenge the way computers are used and sold in the Asia-Pacific region.

www.idc.com

Kevin Noonan

Head of consulting, Intermedium

In 2008, the Federal Government ICT market went through an extraordinary rollercoaster ride. The year started with an overheated market and skills shortages. It ended with vendors trimming back staff and bunkering down for tough times.

In Canberra, the downturn was generally not driven by worldwide economic conditions, but by Government-led changes such as the Gershon Review, Coordinated Procurement, and Defence ICT changes. Essentially, business activity has dropped during the reviews. The Gershon cuts to contractors and business-as-usual funding have received a lot of attention, but their impact next year will be very limited, as the majority of the cuts are weighted toward the out years.

Growing areas of focus this year will be new outsourcing contracts, green IT, governance, methodologies, developing new whole-of-government initiatives, and delivering new government programs.

The big challenge will be managing the change agenda started in 2008. It is now time to move from introspection to delivering the goods.

www.intermedium.com.au

Tom Worthington

Adjunct senior lecturer at ANU, and director of Tomw Communications

The continuing difficult economic times will see the ICT industry struggle to make the case for spending more on computers, to save money elsewhere in the business. But Moore's law will result in the ICT spend reducing in 2009, while delivering more service.

Telcos will sell a lot of 3G wireless broadband accounts, with the price dropping significantly.

Small laptop ''netbooks'' will continue to grow in size and popularity, until units with screens of about 12inches (smaller for women's handbags) costing $500 dominate the laptop market. Netbooks will come with 3G wireless built in and many will be sold on plans with a broadband account, like mobile phones. Netbooks with 3G will be routinely issued by employers to their staff for working away from the office and purchased by home users as a second home computer for use from the kitchen bench.

Nettops small, low-power low-cost (sub-$500) desktop computers will become popular with corporate clients in the public service and private industry. These will replace most sales of business desktop computers by the end of 2009. The nettops will have enough processing power to run office applications locally, but rely on remote servers for corporate applications.

Nettops will not be as popular with home users, due to limited game-playing ability.

The National Broadband Network tender process will be cancelled and a new strategy incorporating wireless broadband (as favoured by the previous government) will be announced. The Government will explain this as an ''enhancement'' to the policy. Telstra will get some of the business as a result, but not as much as it would like.

The attempt to rationalise the Government's existing servers into a few large data centres will be abandoned when it is realised this would result in increased costs. Instead, by the end of the year, a request for tender will be issued for new energy- and space-efficient equipment to replace the Government's major servers. This will reduce the number of servers needed to one for each 50 existing servers and reduce the space needed to house them by 100 times. The 10,000sqm or so of large government data centre space the Gershon Report found in Canberra, will be reduced to about 100sqm.

Private enterprise will be invited to bid to provide the data centre space, but those wanting to build large commercial data hosting services will be disappointed by the small size of the requirements.

Big screen iPhone-like smart phones will keep being released and by the end of 2009, some useful business applications will arrive to justify their purchase by business and government.

The Australian Computer Society's Green ICT course will become the internationally recognised standard certification for the industry. ICT professionals will start including energy and carbon emission estimates in their ICT plans. Many will go on to become the chief sustainability officer of their organisation, covering more than just computers.

Promoted by climate change concerns, new hardware and software will result in a lower ICT budget for most organisations.

Due to the concentration of government jobs in Canberra, its poor public transport and child-minding shortages, the city will lead Australia in teleworking. Several projects to provide remote, secure, web-based access to government systems will be implemented without much fanfare, but allow half the Canberra population to work from home for several days a week by the end of the year.

By mid-year the Government will have got its online policy consultation to work. An unexpected side-effect of this will be that many public servants will find it more effective to submit proposals through this process than through cumbersome internal committee systems. As a result most interdepartmental committees will become virtual, operating via a web interface, by the end of the year.

www.tomw.net.au/

Ian Birks

Chief executive officer, Australian Information Industry Association

The full impact of the Gershon recommendations to cut government business-as-usual expenditure and implement contractor reductions across agencies is yet to be felt. However, the Australian Information Industry Association believes that the national industry and the ACT in particular can expect new policy initiatives to inject fresh activity into the sector, particularly during the second half of 2009.

The economic downturn means additional pressures on SMEs and staff cuts for many multinational corporations. Nonetheless there are definite opportunities open to nimble and innovative businesses in this environment, along with all companies who conduct business with the Federal Government. The ICT sector should also see the beginnings of long-term change across the implementation of major projects flowing from a genuine focus on the importance of ICT from Cabinet through all levels of government leadership.

Following considered development of viable industry recycling models, the establishment of national climate targets and the introduction of mandatory sustainability guidelines in procurement, 2009 is also likely to see the introduction of a national approach to the treatment of eWaste making it the year of sustainability for the national ICT industry.

www.aiia.com.au

Brand Hoff

Founder of Tower Software and director of NICTA

This will be a tough year for the ICT sector as buyers reduce their expenditure to cope with the recession.

The effects of the Gershon recommendations will see a structural change in Federal Government buying patterns. Centralisation of purchasing envisaged by Gershon will take some time to settle down and new bureaucratic procedures will slow down purchasing in Canberra. Contractors will be particularly hard hit as Gershon's 50 per cent in-house target is achieved.

The year will be particularly difficult for start-ups and SMEs due to the lack of funds for growth. Venture capitalists and angel investors will be very cautious until markets pick up and exit opportunities present themselves. VCs will likely support existing rather than new investments to stretch them to a suitable exit.

Nevertheless the brave should consider the down cycle as a good time to complete R&D ready for the next boom cycle. I believe at least a two-year runway should be considered to give plenty of time until there is a new market cycle.

Sorry for the dismal outlook but the sun will come up and life will return to normal.

www.nicta.com.au

David Bryant

Chair of the Canberra branch of the Australian Computer Society

In his recent ABC Boyer Lectures, Rupert Murdoch said, ''What the world is experiencing today is a discontinuity rather than a business cycle''. Murdoch believes organisations that can adjust their business models quickly will survive.

The ICT industry exists to deliver business benefits that enable more efficient and/or effective business processes. Organisations that need to change their business models quickly often look to the ICT industry for answers.

With this premise in mind, I believe the ICT sector will slow in the first half in 2009 with the onset of the international recession and then recover quickly as business models are redesigned.

Canberra has had a year of reviews, and new business models are emerging from the Federal Government. I am optimistic that issues about ICT budgets and an ICT professional's employment status will drift into the background as the more important issues of public service delivery come to the fore.

www.acs.org.au

Alex Zelinsky

Director, CSIRO ICT Centre

Cloud computing is coming. Opportunities will grow to use the technologies being developed by Microsoft, Google and Amazon while the ability to use desktops within an organisation as an ''enterprise cloud'' is also gathering pace. CSIRO will be looking to harness the power of 11,000 desktop computers to help crunch scientific problems in climate, water and materials research.

A race is under way to build massive data and cloud computing centres around the world. Australia has been slow to respond. For example, none of Google's data centres are in this country and the data centre project proposed for Hume is modest by international standards. The opportunity exists for Australia and Canberra to embrace the chance to participate in hosting global infrastructure.

Data will continue to grow exponentially, creating a data tsunami that will challenge organisations. We are entering the petabyte era. A petabyte a million billion bits of information accounts for more than 200,000 movies (all the Hollywood movies ever made). Organisations such as Google process more than 20 petabytes of data a day. CSIRO has more than 1.5 petabytes of data under centre management (not including what our scientists have on their local computers), which will grow by another petabyte in the next 12-18 months.

The challenge lies not in the storage technology, but being able to manage and access the information as required. Increasingly, there is the need to share data across organisational, institutional, geographical and national boundaries. Access must be provided that doesn't require re-transmission of data and doesn't compromise security. Canberra, as the seat of government where enormous data-sets are warehoused, has the opportunity to lead the nation is developing the means to manage data.

Australia has some notable companies in the ICT space and a high proportion are based in Canberra, including CEA, EOS, Seeing Machines, Mediaware, and Funnelback. These companies have succeeded by leveraging R&D done in public institutions such as the ANU and CSIRO. Their success has been augmented by technology incubators, such as Epicorp, with support from the ACT Government.

It's important we continue to strive to create the business environment that will allow the Canberra innovation factory to create new companies leveraging the world-class R&D institutions.

www.csiro.au/org/ICT.html

Richard Harris

Vice-president research,

Gartner Asia-Pacific

Last year was tough for ICT providers in the Federal Government market, with departments being held back from making significant new and renewed contract decisions pending the outcome of the Gershon review. Now that it has been tabled and accepted in full by the Government, the outlook for this year will certainly be no less tough.

The Gershon recommendations are wide-ranging. The major themes of consolidation, more centralised decision-making and deep cuts in the use of contractors will affect all ICT providers, mostly in ways they will not relish. Predicted cost savings of about $500million will have a huge impact on the ICT market.

ICT providers will need to maintain strong relationships with their agency customers to understand their directions and plans as these evolve. Suppliers will have to firm up their position and strategies for what will emerge as a more consolidated and leaner marketplace.

www.gartner.com

Matthew Purcell

The Silicon Kid

If you had to choose one invention as the 2008 gadget of year, you would be pressed to find something which tops the iPhone 3G a complete mobile platform which has created a classic Apple cult-style following with an entire marketplace for applications.

This year is looking like it will be the year of mobile applications, specifically from the iTunes App Store platform. Major investors have identified the potential of this new market, demonstrated by KPMG which has established the $US100million iFund for iPhone development. The benefits of this are not simply limited to consumers, but business adoption of this new mobile technology and associated applications is forecast to be strong. No doubt organisations are investigating ways to leverage the benefits of such a platform within their business processes.

www.siliconkid.com.au