Four Australian Technology Executives Share Their Top IT Business Tips

At VMware’s vForum this year four Australian IT executives from prominent technology companies were wheeled on stage to impart their insights and wisdom on the business and IT landscape. Here’s what they had to say.

CTOs at vForum panel. Credits: VMwre

The IT industry is moving at a rapid pace as new technologies enter the fray. Navigating through all the changes can be a challenge for many organisations across all sectors. At the VMware vForum 2015, executives from technology providers Juniper Networks, Macquarie Telecom, Lenovo and Telstra, were assembled to provide guidance to those who are struggling to translate IT innovation into business benefits.

Firstly, we need to look at IT trends in the local market. Juniper Networks vice-president for systems engineering Russell Skingsley said the ever improving connectivity capabilities across the Asia-Pacific region presents a wealth of opportunities for Australian businesses.

“When I left Australia in 2004 to live in Vietnam I was amazed that a country like Vietnam was able to give me broadband service beyond what Australia could at the time. That’s a familiar story across Asia-Pacific,” he said. “The degree of connectedness in the region means there are more potential customers for the local market and when you think about how you can reach those customers, IT plays an extremely important role in doing so at scale.”

In many ways, Australia is seen as a thought leader in Asia-Pacific given that some of the countries in the region are still considered to be emerging markets. Australian businesses should leverage that credibility, according to Skingsley.

For Macquarie Telecom head of architecture and engineering Palaseri Sujith, hybrid cloud is on the rise and will continue to gain momentum as companies seek to make use of existing internal assets while gaining the benefits of external services. This is also something Telstra end-to-end cloud lead architect Andrew Brydon is seeing with its clients. The telco itself is adopting a hybrid cloud model internally and introducing new types of development technology to drive efficiency through this multicloud approach.

Lenovo director for the enterprise business group Rob Makin noted that IT is moving from a being a back office function to becoming a key player in the front office.

So how should organisations respond to these IT trends? The executives were asked to share their advice on this:

• Juniper’s Russell Skingsley: Don’t be afraid to become a challenger. Constantly ask yourself “how can I do this better?”, “What else do I need to learn?” and “How can I do things differently?”.
• Macquarie Telecom’s Palaseri Sujith: Despite the potential to bring agility to business and IT, hybrid cloud still scares some businesses because they think they’ll have less control over their IT assets. But agility and control are not mutually exclusive and you can have both with hybrid clouds.
• Lenovo’s Rob Makin: People transformation is vital when it comes to adopting technology changes. Start training up workers to use new systems and tools to acclimatise them to a disruptive market place and their every-changing roles within their organisations.
• Telstra’s Andrew Brydon: Look at the application architecture within your organisation and start coming up with strategy now to make it more agile. Don’t delay because you will just be left behind.