Remotely administering switches, servers, telecoms equipment and the like can be difficult, especially when a device locks up and requires a cold boot. In these circumstances, a ‘remote power reboot switch’ can help get that obstinate piece of kit up and running. [ + ]

NEC Australia has appointed Philip Belcher as executive general manager NECare, the company’s multivendor maintenance and support services business. Belcher will be responsible for the maintenance and support services that provision the company’s unified communications sales and channel teams. [ + ]

Desktop virtualisation is becoming increasingly commonplace in Australian organisations. Once you’ve determined that it’s the right approach for your organisation, how do you decide what’s needed to support virtual desktops from your data centre? Stephen Withers explains. [ + ]

The cloud promises to liberate organisations from the limitations of traditional IT infrastructure. Here, Oracle’s Marc Caltabiano argues that early cloud solutions have created new computing silos that actually impose new limits on organisations. He suggests that organisations must take a more nuanced view of the cloud to get the most from a cloud strategy. [ + ]

Ten years ago, business intelligence (BI) solutions were only available to large organisations that could afford to spend time and money developing them in-house. With the advent of the cloud, this scenario is changing. Adam Hawkins, Co-founder and Managing Director, Mercurial, discusses the limitations of in-house business intelligence solutions, and looks at cloud-based solutions as an alternative. [ + ]

The trend of employees bringing their own devices into the workplace will grow rapidly in 2012. This will create even larger stockpiles of data for IT to sift through and manage. Clive Gold*, EMC, reports on the impact of ‘the consumerisation of IT’ on big data - what he calls “the biggest opportunity of this decade” - and how organisations can best tackle it.

The company call centre was once the primary (and a private) port of call for irate or frustrated customers. Now, many are turning to social media, airing their complaints on Twitter or Facebook for the world to see. Robert Allman, of Dimension Data Australia, looks at how to build a competent CRM architecture in this age of social media, and public complaint.

Voice+Data last month earned the award of Cover of the Year for B2B magazines, at the Publishers Australia Excellence Awards. The magazine won the award for the ‘My Dog is a Cloud’ illustration, featured on the cover of the May 2011 issue. [ + ]

With the government finally putting a price on carbon, IT managers around Australia will now have to pay close attention to the efficiency of their storage arrays. Clive Gold, Vice-Chair of SNIA ANZ, explains the rationale behind the association’s new Emerald program, and how you can use it to assess the impact of the carbon price on your own equipment. [ + ]

Innovation Minister Senator Kim Carr recently launched OzHub, a cloud initiative with the aim of building “Australian consumer and business confidence in cloud computing”. Merri Mack takes a closer look at OzHub and its potential impact on cloud computing in Australia. [ + ]

In his eleven years at TechnologyOne, IT Manager Andrew Bauer has seen the IT team grow from just two members to a team that supports the company’s current staff of 850 people. Merri Mack talks to Bauer about the challenges of getting a hold of something relatively intangible - such as the cloud - and using it to create real-world benefits for the business.

Unified communications offers a tantalising mix of productivity benefits, but the cost of a full-blown enterprise-grade deployment is prohibitive to many organisations. However, with the emergence of cloud-based unified communications services, these benefits are becoming available to more and more Australian businesses, as Stephen Withers found out.

Server virtualisation is growing ever more popular thanks to its potential to drive down costs and increase flexibility. But pre-virtualisation server performance metrics no longer apply, making any application performance problems hard to diagnose, leaving users wondering where their app went and IT with no answer. Rafi Katanasho, Compuware, explains what you can do about it.

Aggregating reams of data on your users and customers, then mining that data for business intelligence, is powerful indeed. But combining these otherwise disparate stockpiles of personal data has grave ethical implications, particularly if these datasets should ever fall into the wrong hands. Conrad Bates, from C3 Business Solutions, discusses these considerations and the need for ethics standards for information management.

IT departments are being urged to make use of new technologies like social media, mobility, virtualisation and the cloud. Each of these carries new security risks and IT departments must learn new tactics to successfully secure them, as Merri Mack explains.